Adventure Time: a Complete and Total History of the Adventure Time Universe

[ THIS TIMELINE IS NOW VERY OUTDATED ]
[ THIS TIMELINE WAS RELEASED IN THE MIDDLE OF SEASON 7 ]
[ THE SERIES FINALE AIRED SEPTEMBER 4, 2018]
[ FOR THE FINAL, EXTENSIVELY UPDATED VERSION OF THIS TIMELINE, GO HERE: LINK PENDING ]
Welcome to the incredibly extensive, fully up to date, thoroughly summarized, 80ish% precise and chronological, 20ish% speculative history of the Adventure Time universe. This timeline is designed to take you through every major lore event from ancient history to modern times, from the primordial universe and creation of the Ice Crown, to Joshua and Margaret the dogs' adoption of Finn the Human.
You'll explore the very nature of magic and reality, learn all about the legends and ancient gods and monsters that dominated prehistory, bear witness to the great Mushroom War, and heed the tale of the demon princess and the ice wizard, reading all about their lives apart and together, and their eventual transformations into the Vampire Queen and the Ice King. After that, you'll walk through the rise of the Land of Ooo and the Candy Kingdom, witnessing all of the events that transpired after the Mushroom War, over the roughly one thousand years between the war and the first episode of the first season.
This timeline is divided into six eras, each of which you can explore in detailed summary in the super convenient "Timeline Index" I've provided at the beginning of the album. The very end of the album addresses some pending historical topics and fuzzier points of the lore, though there aren't too many of these left at this point: the show has gotten to the point where we have a pretty good overview of the entire canon, and we're just filling in the details now. What is left will likely be covered by the show in the upcoming seasons: Season 7, which is currently airing, has already been dense with lore episodes, and only seems set to give us even more.
Have fun!
[Note: Text for entries "Rattleballs" and "Pending Historical Topics" continuously disappear and reappear for whatever reason.]

References

All information and reference was drawn directly from the following sources:
1. The show itself, up to and including Season 7 Episodes 13/14 "The More You Moe, the Moe You Know"
2. "Adventure Time: the Enchiridion and Marcy's Super Secret Scrapbook!!!"
~~~~ "Weekly Records in the Wreckage of the World: A Survivor's Notes"; by Simon Petrikov
~~~~ "Marcy's Super Secret Srapbook!!!"; by Marceline Abadeer
~~~~ "The Enchiridion"
Simon's "Weekly Records" is a journal kept by Simon Petrikov during the post-war period, with the first entry occurring on the day he found Marceline. "Marceline's Scrapbook" is the exact same journal, but a continuation from Marceline's perspective, seemingly beginning within a few days of Simon's last entry. Note that if the show and book conflicted in some area, I went with the show's portrayal of events over the book's. The most prominent example of this is Marceline's motivation for hunting vampires. The comics and video games were not used for reference in any way, as they have been stated to not be canon with the show.
Finally, a big thank you to all of the artists whose works were used in this timeline. I'm sorry I didn't provide any links to the works, but a quick reverse Google image search should bring you to the source on most if not all of the images.

Timeline Index

The 94 entries of "Adventure Time: The Complete Story (Pt.1) are organized into the nine sections listed below. (13 images in album are intro title cards)
== Prehistoric Era Part I: The Multiverse
== Prehistoric Era Part II: Dimensions and Cosmic Entities
== Prehistoric Era Part III: Earth & Martian Prehistory
== Mushroom War Era Part I: Before the War
== Mushroom War Era Part II: Simon and Marcy
== Mushroom War Era Part III: The Last Humans
== Millenium Era Part I: The Candy Kingdom
== Millenium Era Part II: History of Ooo
== Millenium Era Part III: Birth of Heroes
The 134 entries of "Adventure Time: The Complete Story (Pt.2)" are organized into the five sections listed below.
== Modern Era Part I: The Land of Ooo
== Modern Era Part II: Beginnings
== Modern Era Part III: The Lich and the Hero's Heart
== Modern Era Part IV: Reckonings of the Past
== Modern Era Part V: GOLB and the Gum War
== Future Era: Everything Stays
If you'd like to keep this index open in a separate tab so that you can follow along with it while reading through, you can open this link:

Primordial Reality

"Before there was time, before there was anything…there was nothing. And before there was nothing…there were monsters."
[Season 6 Episode 26 "Gold Stars"]
The Lich gives us a glimpse of what the universe, or rather all of reality, looked like before it even existed; a plane of chaos, a literally endless pool of monsters so vast it spills over the edges of infinity. The Lich itself was supposedly born in this place before even time existed, along with Orgalorg, and possibly GOLB and Hunson Abadeer, among many others. Why this is what pre-existence looked like, and how the world evolved out of this form is unknown. Was it some Big Bang type event, where the monster soup suddenly just exploded into something else? Or maybe a slower, more purposeful process? All we know is that even now, the monsters remain.

Prehistoric Era: The Multiverse

"Third Orb (Earth) does not exist," said the Sage.
"Why?" asked the Student.
"Because the Multiverse," said the Sage, "within which Third Orb exists, does not exist. The Multiverse is a Consensus Reality shared by the Minds of all Sentient Beings. If they were to Die, the Multiverse, as such, would suddenly blink out of existence, vanish, be no more."
"Why?" asked the Student.
"Because," said the Sage, "there would be no one to perceive it."
[The Enchiridion]
"At the center of the multiverse is a dimension called the Time Room, believed to be the quasi-corporeal dwelling place of the almighty Prismo. The Time Room is the single dimension that exists outside of time. The Time Room produces time waves that are experienced by other dimensions. Some dimensions have permanent links that allow travel to and from. Others become linked temporarily by naturally forming Worm Holes. And others can become linked artificially by magical portals, torn open by items of great power. Once the last gem is inserted into the Enchiridion it will have the power to create a portal to any dimension in the multiverse. An activated portal creates a time dilation in which either end of the portal experiences a temporal synchronization allowing for the safe passage of particles through a non-local region of space-time."
[Season 4 Episode 26 "The Lich"]
The Multiverse is made up of a series of dimensions all centered around Prismo's Time Room. One such dimension is that of Earth/Ooo, the dimension containing the planets, stars, galaxies, and all of space as we know it. Other dimensions include the Nightosphere, the Crystal Dimension, the Citadel, Cosmic Owl's motel, and possibly Lumpy Space, among a seemingly endless number of others. Each of these dimensions can be thought of as a kind of cosmic bubble or "planet" existing within the "solar system" that is the multiverse, with the Time Room as the "star" of the solar system. Just as a real star provides heat to its planets and holds the solar system together with gravity, the Time Room provides time to all of the dimensions and acts as a kind of temporal anchor.
Through various means, including natural occurrences, random chance, and physical or metaphysical manipulation, temporary or permanent connections - portals, wormholes, etc - can link certain dimensions and act as instantly traversable pathways between them. One example of this is the ritual that can be used to open a momentary portal between Earth and the Nightosphere: draw a smiley face on a flat surface, then douse the face in "bug milk". Another, more prominent example is the temporary portal that can be opened between Earth and ANY other dimension by sacrificing the Enchiridion as a kind of portal catalyst.
The Enchiridion, and later Simon Petrikov in his journal, also go into some detail on certain pseudo-scientific features of each dimension, namely their "vibration" and "elasticity". Each dimension, its particles, and its inhabitants share a certain unique mode of vibration. This vibration seems to be the hand wavy way of explaining the different physical properties and laws of each dimension, as well as explaining why the dimensions are separate from each other at all, i.e. why they aren't all just part of one big shared dimension in a single universe, rather than a Multiverse (because their particles are vibrating differently). Additionally, manipulating the vibrations of two separate dimensions is the key to creating portals between them; apparently, there are some kind of interdimensional particles also contributing to the separation of the dimensions, and by altering the vibration of the particles within two dimensions, you can create a hole that both bypasses the interdimensional particles and aligns the two dimensions' particles; i.e. create a portal.
The elasticity on the other hand, is a measure of how "firm" and invariable the governing laws of each dimension are. It's probably best to think of a dimension's elasticity as how "broad" the "range" of that dimension's particles' vibration is. Thus, the less elastic a dimension is, the tighter the range of its particles' vibration. As you'll see later, as a dimension becomes more elastic, it becomes more permeable to the rest of the Multiverse; broader vibrational range means more room to penetrate through. This concept will be very important when explaining the consequences of the Mushroom War, so keep it in mind.
How the Multiverse came to be is unknown, as is what became of the monster dominated pre-existence that comprised reality before the Multiverse. Asking about the origins of the Multiverse may be a trite endeavor, however.
"Where did the Multiverse come from? Since logic dictates that asking this question must result in an infinite regression - Who/what created the Multiverse? And what created the Thing that created the Thing that created the Multiverse? Et cetera - this suggests that the mental engine of logical thinking is not designed to determine the Answer."
[The Enchiridion]
Nonetheless, it is important to wonder about the connection between the primordial monster soup and the Multiverse because of a certain extinguisher of life: the Lich. From the unnamed Sage's words we gather that the Multiverse is an anthropic reality which relies on being observed in order to exist. This may show that the Lich's true ultimate goal is to return reality to its initial state; its stated goal is to completely wipe out all life, which by extension would end the Multiverse.

Prehistoric Era: Magic and the Cosmic Imagination

"If reality is Mental in nature, analogous to a Cosmic Mind, and if Wizardry is a function of the Imagination, then the Forces of Nature in the Multiverse are akin to the Currents of the Cosmic Imagination. Thus, the Origin of Wizardry is at the Core of Creation, and Wizards can create or destroy as they wish, tapping into the Power of the Cosmic Imagination."
[The Enchiridion]
Because the Multiverse is a "Consensus Reality", it follows that consciousness - rather than physics and mathematics - is the ultimate driving force of nature. This fact allows conscious beings to willfully warp reality. So then why is everyone in the Multiverse not running around donkin everything up all the time? Probably because understanding and getting in direct touch with "the Cosmic Imagination" is pretty difficult, and even when people manage to do it, they don't get the exact results they want. A prime example of this is Finn willing the universe to help him in Season 6 Episode 43 "The Comet", and the result being Martin showing up. While this does end up helping Finn in the long run, it is not ideal, and it took quite a bit of concentration on Finn's part just to make the vague cry for help.
Magic and wizardry, it seems, are somewhat of a workaround that let's people manipulate reality with the Cosmic Imagination without fully tapping into it. By pretending or misinterpreting one's own connection to the "Cosmic Mind" and "Cosmic Imagination" as magic, focusing on what you're trying to achieve is easier.
"The Imagination is the Manifestation of the Visible from the Invisible. It is the Engine of the Unconscious, and it is there that all desires, all dreams, all plans, and all achievements are born. Wizardry is the ability to control and focus the Imagination in specific ways that will unleash Hidden Powers. However, these so-called Hidden Powers need not be magical at all. Wizardry, you see, is not necessarily about magical things. It's about things *seeming* to be magical. Since the Wizard's imagination is attenuated to achieve any effect, a Wizard freely indulges in crass, sleight of hand parlor tricks using smoke and mirrors, but presented with sultry words dripping with The Mysterious. Seeming to be Magical is more important than Being Magical."
[The Enchiridion]

Prehistoric Era: The Infinite Enchiridion

"I am unique in that I am the only object that has been imbued with the sum total of the Consciousness of all the Wizards since the formation of Fire, Ice, Slime, and Candy."
"I, THE ENCHIRIDION, supersaturated with contradictory Spells, change with each reading. These words will disappear forever after you have read them, to be replaced by something else the next time you read it. What you are reading now is a synthesis of the random thoughts in your brain combined with the magical energy in Me, a Book charged with enchantment by Ten Thousand Magicians over the expanse of a Million Years. In effect, since I am never the same, I am a book of infinite pages and infinite words. Since I am different every time, then truly I am impossible to read, for no definitive Book exists, only the ever-changing, ephemeral experience of reading it."
[The Enchiridion]
The Enchiridion is...something. Trying to read through it is something else. It's not entirely clear when it is was written, or if it was ever even written at all; it seems to literally transcend time and reality. It has knowledge of events that have occurred all over time and existence, and possesses some degree of both omnipotence and omnipresence. On the surface, it is a two part handbook: one part for heroes, one part for wizards. It often speaks cryptically of some Ultimate Destiny which heroes and wizards must eventually face together, and how the Multiverse and time itself changed after the Mushroom War. The longer it goes on, the more sentient it becomes, and the more directly it speaks to the reader, no longer about the path to becoming a hero or wizard, but about some dream. Its final pages - or at least what the reader perceives as the final pages - are a frenzied slur about the end of the dream, and the rebirth and repetition of reality that will come with that end.
What exactly is the Enchiridion, and when will the Ultimate Destiny and dream which it speaks of come to fruition?

Prehistoric Era: The Catalyst Comets

“Every one thousand years the Catalyst Comet mysteriously reincarnates itself and collides with Earth, bringing with it an agent of change.”
[Season 6 Episode 25 “Astral Plane”]
The Catalyst Comets are a series of mythical comets belonging to some kind of universal essence of everything, a kind of sentient nirvana if you will. They are not just embodiments of the Cosmic Mind or Cosmic Imagination, but of the entire universe. It would not be inaccurate to describe them as the single most important lore objects in all of Adventure Time, to the point where they form the backbone of the entire history.
A comet of a unique color, and sometimes even shape and texture, comes to Earth once every one thousand years; exactly every one thousand years to the day, without fail or exception. Consequently, history is almost entirely defined in periods of thousands of years, and every major time period has an associated Catalyst Comet. Each comet also brings "an agent of change", or rather, each comet is the first incarnation of an unique comet avatar, an entity that will be reborn in a new form (supposedly on Earth) as each of its lives ends. It is not clear if every single incarnation acts as "an agent of change", or how profoundly this role manifests, i.e. how significant the change is. Also, while only one Catalyst Comet occurs every one thousand years, the avatars which the comets spawn can exist at the same time as each other, and at the same time as other comets. So seemingly, the comet avatars kind of just pile up on Earth over time (that is, assuming none of the avatars ever break out of the reincarnation cycle).
So far, four of the Catalyst Comets that have occurred throughout history have been shown, but there have been at least a handful more occurring between these four. In chronological order of their arrival to Earth, the four comets we know of are:
1. A green comet (coming up)
2. A yellow comet (also coming up after the green comet)
3. A blue comet (blue like a certain hero's shirt...)
4. The purple comet of modern times

Prehistoric Era: Creation of the Ice Crown

"Are you listening Chatsberry? When this comet hits, everybody dies. Not just everyone but us. BUT US."
[Season 6 Episode 24 “Evergreen”]
"In ancient times, there were four Primordial Beings - the equivalent of Wizards, but known then as Elementals. They each ruled as Elemental Kings and Queens over the Four Realms, named after the Four Primordial Elements: Fire, Ice, Slime, and Candy. Like the Wizards we know and love, these four Elementals created and destroyed by wielding their Imaginations upon the Matrix of Matter and Energy."
[The Enchiridion]
The Earth appears in some sort of cretaceous period, and the sky is lit up green as a menacing new, seemingly horned Catalyst Comet hurdles towards the Earth. At this time, the world is divided into four realms each watched over by an "elemental"; a powerful kind of proto-wizard specializing in one of the four primordial "elements"; ice, fire, candy, and slime.
Urgence Evergreen, the elemental of ice, gathers the other elementals - Chatsberry of the candy, Balthus of the fire, and Slimy D. of the slime - atop his icy tower to discuss what to do about the comet. Their meeting is spied on by Evergreen’s young assistant, Gunter the dinosaur. The other elementals do not seem too worried by the comet, as “hath not a comet impacted our world once every thousand years with no lasting grievousness?” Evergreen would normally agree, but as he states “this, Balthus is no ordinary comet. See how it writhes? It aches for our extinction!” (A green glowing thing that aches for the extinction of all life. Sound familiar?) Chatsberry points out the futility in even bothering trying to stop the comet, to which Evergreen responds with a plan: build a powerful crown, “a magical crown whose phantasmal circuitry will bond to its first wearer, and grant him his one deepest wish." (destroying the comet, hopefully) He then immediately reveals that he has actually already built such a crown, but it requires the “ruby eyes” of a legendary lava monster dwelling in a volcano as a power source.
The other elementals protest this plan, citing the apparently incredible dangers of “wish magic.” They state that even if all life is extinguished by the comet, their elements will live on, and thus from that life may one day be able to return. However, “a misplaced wish could cause irreversible damage, to the very structure of existence.” Evergreen becomes displeased with the other elementals, and as they attempt to stop him from carrying out his plan to get the ruby eyes and use the crown, he freezes all of them to keep them from interfering. Gunter and Evergreen then depart for the volcano to get the ruby eyes.
It is revealed on this journey how much Gunter looks up to his master Evergreen, and how badly the young dinosaur wishes to learn magic from him. However, Evergreen is highly neglectful and apathetically abusive towards his young apprentice, and silently swears that Gunter will probably always be too incompetent to learn magic. When Evergreen is fighting the lava monster and is almost killed, Gunter kind of comes to his rescue by attempting to use one of his master’s magic bottles to attack the monster. However, he fails and merely acts as a distraction, but this is good enough for Evergreen to regain himself and finish off the monster. Rather than be thankful towards young Gunter, Evergreen is even more annoyed than usual and reprimands him for not staying put as he was commanded.
Back at the ice tower, Evergreen binds the ruby eyes to the crown and prepares to wish away the comet. But before he can, the now enraged lava monster bursts into the room and begins rampaging. The creature knocks out multiple columns and the ice tower begins to collapse, just as the comet is about to impact. Evergreen is trapped under the rubble and has lost his hold on the crown, which Gunter managed to pick up during the chaos. Unable to escape and beginning to panic, he commands Gunter to put on the crown and wish away the comet in his stead. However, Evergreen underestimated the dangers of wish magic, and did not heed Chatsberry and Balthus’ warnings about knowing what one’s heart truly desires. For young Gunter, his truest desire is not the comet’s destruction, but to learn ice magic and be like his master. The crown grants him this wish, and Gunter begins to sprout white hairs and shoot bolts of ice, all while hysterically reprimanding himself in the third person, as Evergreen would have done: he is literally becoming his master.
With this, the crown’s one wish has been fulfilled, and it is now eternally infused with that wish. Anyone who dons the crown from now on shall gain the powers of the ice elemental Urgence Evergreen, and be possessed with the lunacy of young Gunter. The Ice Crown has been created. The menacing green comet with the horns lands on the ice tower in a bright flash, and the fate of young Gunter, his cold master, the other elementals, and all of the earth is unknown, but it cannot be good. The comet is a Catalyst Comet after all, one that aches for the extinction of all life. What monstrous evil will it spawn?
(The Enchiridion also tells of the tale of Evergreen and the green Catalyst Comet, and this version of the story ends with a "massive explosion (that) sent clouds of dust over the planet, blocking the sun for hundreds of years, bringing about an Age of Extinction.")

Prehistoric Era: Dark God GOLB and Magic Man

"You were gone, erased, only existing here. And here. For hundreds of years I held that sadness until my magic and science were strong enough to create you from my nightmares."
[Season 6 Episode 38 “You Forgot Your Floaties”]
At some time in Mars' past, a terrible god of existence even more powerful than Orgalorg or the Lich attacked Grob Gob Glob Grod’s utopic Martian society. The Martians were evidently able to repel GOLB, or at least get him to go away somehow, but at great cost. Magic Man, the brother of G4, lost his wife Margles to the beast. She was not just taken or killed, however. Magic Man states that in the centuries following this loss, he “looked everywhere…every dimension, every dead world” for his wife. In a flashback, he even attempts to wish Margles back in Prismo’s time room, but the wish somehow, to even Prismo’s bewilderment and amazement, fails. It seems as though Margles has literally ceased to exist, except within Magic Man’s heart and mind that is.
G4 discusses with his grieving brother the very real possibility that GOLB will one day return to Mars, and the urgent need for a planetary security system capable of defending against him. Magic Man complies, and through centuries of deep trance meditation in which he manages to merge the forces of magic and science, develops an awesome security system he dubs M.A.R.G.L.E.S. (Magical Automated Resistance Generating Laser Energy Supplier), obviously a tribute to his beloved lost wife. The system, when inactive, looks exactly like Margles, and even speaks and acts just like a normal person. G4 comments on this fact, and wonders if his brother's mental state may have negatively influenced the creation of the M.A.R.G.L.E.S. system and made it unstable. Magic Man assures his brother that everything is fine, but this is a lie.
As he prepares to activate the system at the peak of Olympus Mons, he hesitates. He does not wish to lose his wife again, even if this version of her is little more than a fake knock off. Magic Man discusses his hesitation with M.A.R.G.L.E.S., and in the process confirms that she was made from his nightmares. Catastrophe erupts with the systems's activation, and in true reflection of Magic Man's nightmares, it takes on a hideous, warped formed of his beloved Margles. Hating what he has created, he attempts to shut down the system, but as he does it assaults him and tosses him away. He does eventually manage to shut down and destroy the system, apparently leaving Mars defenseless against any future comings of GOLB.
Magic Man's body recovers from the incident, but his mind never will. This new trauma has only served to fuel his growing senility, and he will continue his descent into madness caused by the loss of his wife, now at an accelerated rate.

Prehistoric Era: Reign and Demise of Orgalorg

“Orgalorg was an ancient cosmic entity who ruled the solar system with his cruel and deadly whims. The Breaker of Worlds. He was seeking ever more power, he was seeking to intercept a Catalyst Comet and absorb its essence. There by did he offend the King of Mars (Abraham Lincoln), who decreed that Orgalorg should be cast down. And yes he was cast down, by the flaming sword of Grob Gob Glob Grob. Orgalorg was banished to an inhospitable planet (Earth) where he would forget everything. Yay, even forget his identity, and from whence he came…and the prophets say that the gravity of the planet did crush and compress Orgalorg into a more powerless and cuddlesome form. Ooooooo. But now he’s back, and whose fault is that? Make outs."
(Orgalorg was used as a kind of ghost story on this alien parent to prevent teenagers from making out).
[Season 6 Episode 40 “Orgalorg"]
Orgalorg was a great space monster that terrorized the Oovian solar system in ancient times, but then tried to bite off way more than he could chew. Seeking ever more power, the great monster sought to consume the essence of a Catalyst Comet, but this was the last straw for Abraham Lincoln, King of Mars. Lincoln summoned the great Martian deific champion Grob Gob Glob Grod and requested that he prevent Orgalorg from absorbing the comet. G4 complied and flew into space at once, where he did battle with the Breaker of Worlds, flaming sword in hand. The champion was victorious, and with a final strike of his sword sent Orgalorg hurdling towards the Earth. During the descent through the atmosphere, the planet's gravity "did crush and compress Orgalorg into a more powerless and cuddlesome form", i.e. Gunter the Penguin. For millennia, Gunter - now completely amnesiac and unaware of his previous incarnation - wandered the Earth, until he eventually arrived at the modern day Ice Kingdom.
What became of the yellow Catalyst Comet which Orgalorg failed to absorb? We still don't know for sure, but perhaps one day a certain yellow dog will dream of the comet, and recognize it as one of his past lives...

Mushroom War Era: Simon Petrikov and Betty Grof

The age of the ancients has long since passed, and the age of humans is at hand. The solar system is free from the hideous leviathan Orgalorg, the dark god GOLB seemingly has not returned, and whatever foul creature emerged from the green Catalyst Comet does not *appear* to have had any visible, significant, or lasting effect on the world. Magic is an ancient and unknown art, and the biosphere is much less...strange. Earth exists as we know it, with all of the continents and countries and creatures that we are familiar with.
Somewhere in this peaceful world lives a happy young couple, a pair of academics whose passion for the archaic and mystical is trumped only by their love for each other. After years of romance, the two soul mates become engaged, and the future husband and wife Simon Petrikov and Betty Grof seem set to live happily ever after. But as strong as their love may be, even the exciting prospect of marriage does not slow down the couple's intense passion for research. They seem to spend almost all of their time together doing work, especially co-authoring books such as their "Mystic Rituals and their Space Time Applications"; an anthropological encyclopedia detailing rituals carried out by various peoples, especially those rituals that invoke summonings and portals.
This is not to say the two haven't made breakthrough discoveries on their own. In the future, Betty will develop a theory that is the magic and supernatural equivalent of quantum mechanics, a theory that comes very close to outlining the key to manipulation of the Cosmic Imagination. Simon, on the other hand, will uncover artifacts that entangle him in Earth's oldest and greatest struggle...

Mushroom War Era: Marceline Abadeer

"And then he said fine. And that's the story of how I met your dad."
"Can I play now?"
"No, Marceline sweetie, it's nap time."
"But I don't wanna sleep! My dreams are weird!"
"All dreams are weird."
"But mom, my dreams are weeeeeiiiiiiiird."
"Honey, something weird might be something familiar viewed from a different angle. And that's not scary right?"
[Season 7 Episode 7 "Stakes Pt.2 Everything Stays"]
Some time during the romance of Simon Petrikov and Betty Grof, there was another, far more unusual love taking place. A human woman of unknown age or origin had been brought together by fate with Hunson Abadeer, Lord of Demons and Ruler of the Nightosphere. The nature of this human-demon relationship is unknown; how long it lasted, what dimension it occurred in, if there were any romantic feelings involved, etc. The greatest mystery though, is why the notoriously ruthless Hunson Abadeer - who usually immediately sucks the soul out of all mortals he comes across - not only spared the soul of this particular mortal, but engaged in a deep relationship with her. All we know for sure is that from this coupling came a little girl; a half human, half demon child destined to endure great suffering, to be a guardian for mankind during its darkest age, and to become the queen and sole surviving specimen of the vampires. At a time when Simon Petrikov was 40 years old, Marceline Abadeer was born of flesh and shadow.
Currently, not much else is known of Marceline's early life. In her scrapbook, Marceline admits that she is vaguely aware of having spent some time alone with her mother when she was younger, but her memories are so sparse that she cannot even remember her mother's face. From the short glimpse we are given in the "Stakes" miniseries, it appears their time together was spent reclusively and isolated. The scene takes place in a slightly beat up camper/RV, and the limited view out the window suggests a desert environment, or at least some place that's a bit sandy. Hunson Abadeer was absent during this time, and we later discover that he was off playing Demon Lord in the Nightosphere; supposedly, he did not want to bring Marceline along because "the Nightosphere is no place for a child." Whatever became of Marceline's mother, or how Marceline eventually ended up alone after the Mushroom War, is still a mystery.
One thing we can be sure of, is that by the time Marceline was five years old, two of her future best friends were already sharing the world with her. One was the now 45 year old Simon Petrikov. The other had just cut through the atmosphere in a spectacular blaze, ready to crash into the Earth and begin a millennium of reincarnation.

Mushroom War Era: The Blue Comet and the Butterfly

COMET: Finn. Do you remember.
FINN: Yeah...I think so... A long time ago, I was you sort of (image of the blue Catalyst Comet traveling and crashing), and I crashed on Earth, and became a butterfly or some biz. And I guess it was just some random absurd thing, just a joke I’ve been playing out for centuries.
COMET: Who’s creating the joke? Are you? And if so, then are you my creator?
FINN: Uh, maybe? I dunno. Prolly not.
COMET: Probably not, but who knows. I have been around forever, and experienced so much impossible junk. I’ve embodied all that is good, and evil (image of the Lich flashes). And now we’re here. It’s unprecedented. And I give you a choice. Come with me to the end, and the beginning. Or struggle here for a while like a beautiful autumn leaf. This is your crisis. As you stand on the edge of freedom, from love, hate, friendship, isolation, jealousy, secrets, violence, video games, ice cream waffles, sadness, madness, power, honor, loyalty, saucy, mothers, fathers, scoundrels…
FINN: How long are you gonna list stuff?
COMET: It’s a long list.
FINN: You’re tellin me to abandon all this stuff (motions to Earth/Ooo), but, you’re not really makin it sound bad.
COMET: It’s not bad. I’m just giving you the choice of a new mode of existence.
FINN: I feel like I put a lotta work into this meat reality. I’d like to see it through.
COMET: Fair enough.
[Season 6 Episode 43 "The Comet"]
Finn's exchange with a sentient version of the purple Catalyst Comet - the comet of the modern era - reveals that he is a Catalyst Comet avatar. In fact, assuming that "centuries" explicitly means "less than one thousand years", he is the avatar of the comet that came during the Mushroom War era.
Using clues provided in the episodes "Simon and Marcy" and "The Comet", we can pin down the exact relative year when the blue comet arrived. When Marceline is telling the story of her and Simon's time together in the apocalypse in "Simon and Marcy", Finn is 14 years old. The day on which the events of "Simon and Marcy" take place happened exactly 996 years ago, on the same day that Marceline is telling the story. On the day that the story took place, Marceline is 7 years old and Simon is 47 (as revealed by Simon). In "The Comet", Finn is 16 years old, which means that as of that episode, the events of "Simon and Marcy" had now taken place 998 years ago. Since the comets come exactly every one thousand years, this shows that the Mushroom War era comet must have come two years before the day on which the events of "Simon and Marcy" occurred, i.e. when Marcy was 5 and Simon was 45.
Finn's past lives and his reincarnation cycle have been an overarching theme of the show for quite a while. He first recognized the blue comet and the butterfly, as well as some slime thing and the female thief Shoko, as some of his past lives in Season 5 Episode 34 “The Vault”. The butterfly - the first reincarnation of the blue comet - has also been alluded to multiple times in more subtle ways throughout the series. For example, in Season 3 Episode 7 "Still", Finn and Jake are being held captive by the Ice King, and Finn attempts to call out to an "astral beast" for assistance: the result is a herd of butterflies coming to their rescue.
It is not clear what effect the blue Catalyst Comet or its butterfly incarnation may have had on the world at the time. There was a lot going on though, and you never know what may have been caused by a little Butterfly Effect. For the next millennium, the comet butterfly would die and be reborn a dozen times into a dozen different forms, all the while bearing witness to the Mushroom War and the rise of the land of Ooo as we know it. Until finally, one stormy night at sea, two of the last remaining humans would welcome their infant son into the world. Ooo's greatest hero had just been born, but no one in the land was any the wiser to his existence.

Mushroom War Era: Simon Petrikov Discovers the Ice Crown

"After purchasing this crown from an old dock worker in Northern Scandinavia, I bought it home and excitedly showed my fiance Betty. I jokingly put it on my head, just for a laugh or something. And that's when it started."
[Season 3 Episode 20 "Holly Jolly Secrets Pt 2"]
As an antiquarian, Simon spent more time in the field than in the books, gathering and inspecting antiques and what not. On one particular excursion in Scandinavia, he comes across a very peculiar artifact: a golden crown infused with three brilliant rubies. For kicks, and maybe just because it looks really really cool, he buys the crown from the dock worker who owned it. Whether this dock worker was just some simple fellow who happened to possess one of the two most powerful and ancient items in all of existence (seemingly without falling victim to its potent curse) or an agent trying to bring that item back into the fold of things, is unknown...
Once he's back home, Simon presents the crown to Betty, and the two gawk and joke over the strange artifact. Caught up in the moment, Simon dons the crown for the very first time; this will prove to be his greatest mortal folly. A malevolent, chilly mist fills his mind and blends his thoughts into slush. His fingers begin to freeze over and crust in icicles, while his hair fades to white and drips to the floors. His lips flush blue, and from them he whispers a single silent word: Gunter.
A piece of Simon Petrikov erupts through the mist, and in a panic he smacks the crown off of his head. Heaving in course breaths and shivering in a sub-zero cold sweat, he looks up to find Betty staring at him in horror. The transformation has begun.

Mushroom War Era: Simon Petrikov Discovers the Enchiridion

Some months later, Simon has recovered from his initial foray into icy madness. While out on an expidition, he discovers yet another ancient magical artifact, this time in the Hindu Kush; the Enchiridion. It seems few people recognized the significance of this discovery however, and those who did were not even overly enthralled, describing it only as "mildly interesting." Most everything we know about Simon's discovery of the Enchiridion, as well as what became of it until Finn and Jake recover it in modern times, comes from the limited newspaper clipping above. Simon (or rather, the Ice King in the future) unfortunately seems to have scribbled all over it, so for now we still know basically nothing, and what we do know is questionable at best. The two things we know are:
1. He found it in the Hindu Kush. In a note he left in "The Enchiridion", he states "On my recent expedition to Islamabad, in a secret vault in the Hindu Kush mountains, I discovered an incredible book known as the 'Enchiridion'."
2. The book at this time likely contained the crowned gems of the future Ooovian princesses: "The cover ~~~~ with a still life and inset with a variety of gems was nice to look at."
Based on notes he left inside the Enchiridion, the Ice Crown was continuing to haunt Simon Petrikov at this point in time. Some of the notes rant about "visions of volcanoes! Lava monsters! That's got to mean something, right?" Obviously, he has been wearing the crown again over these past couple of months. His deterioration concerns Betty, and she pleas with him to get rid of the strange object. His refusal and continuing ravings begin to upset her, and a rift forms between the two.
"Betty, this crown is really doing a number on my head. I'm sorry I said all those weird things! I know you're mad. I know I should stop wearing it, but I can't right now! I've got some things to do first."
[Simon's Post-It Notes in the Enchiridion]
It is at this point that the crown starts pushing Simon to reestablish the northern ice realm of Urgence Evergreen, though he does not know it yet.
'Princess, once I'm back, how about we take a trip? We can forget about work and crowns and musty old books for a little while. We'll take a vacation, just you and me, someplace nice. Maybe up north."
Amidst this downward spiral, Simon seems to have completed his inspection of the Enchiridion, and prepares to send it off to the "Scandinavian Institute of Technology". However, something was changing in the political landscape of the world, the "International Crisis" as Simon calls it.
"If this International Crisis gets any worse, they might cancel shipping flights to Scandinavia."
It's unknown if the book ever even made it the museum...

Mushroom War Era: Betty Flees to the Future

"The visions, I fought with them, shouted at them until I realized it wasn't real, it was the crown! I quickly took it off, and saw my fiance in front of me, looking at me with such contempt. What had I said? What had I done when I wore this crown? All I know is I never saw Betty again."
[Season 3 Episode 20 "Holly Jolly Secrets Pt 2"]
The crown calls out to Simon Petrikov once again, and he listens. Now matter how hard he fights, he cannot resist the overwhelming urge to wear it. In an instant he is once again overcome with the awesome ice powers of the elemental Urgence Evergreen, as well as the twisted and senile psyche of the abused young dinosaur Gunter. He turns completely hysterical and begins flaunting incredible ice powers without reserve; the transformation is much worse this time than it ever has been before, and the Ice King is in total control. A terrified Betty flees for her own safety, but Simon takes to the streets, hunting after his bewildered fiance and screaming "where's my Betty?! Where's my princess?! Princess! Princess!!"
One thousand years in the future, the present era of the show, a magic negating entity known as Bella Noche has rendered the Ice Crown’s power temporarily impotent. This event has reverted the Ice King completely to Simon Petrikov. Unfortunately, at this point Simon, a mere human, has been kept alive for one thousand years by the crown’s magic. In a kind of whiplash effect, his age begins rapidly catching up to him, and he begins to die. But there is something he must do before he goes. Simon never knew what became of Betty in the past, and he assumed he had lost her forever. With the help of his old friend Marceline, he opens a temporary time portal so that he might say a last goodbye to his beloved fiance.
However, Mushroom War era Betty, who is fleeing the crown possessed Simon at the instant the portal opens, has other plans, and leaps through the tiny time portal and into the future, back into the arms of her beloved Simon. In this future, Betty defeats the creature Bella Noche, thus restoring the Ice Crown’s power. She forces the crown upon Simon in order to keep him alive, but only as a temporary solution until she can figure out how to negate its negative effects, while still keeping it powerful enough to keep Simon alive. She sets out into Ooo to seek out the true nature of magic and magic users.
Eventually, she develops a theory that may aid her, and indeed unlock the key to all magic and more. Her "Magic Madness Sadness" theory, or MMS for short, proposes understanding magic, magic users, and the magical engine connecting the two as the manifestation of some blend of madness and sadness rooted deep within each individual magic user. Perhaps in order to test this theory, she plots to gain Magic Man's powers and become a magic user herself. Unfortunately, at least for the brief first moment that we see her as the new Magic Woman, it seems this effort may have turned her completely mad and sad, with no intuition left over to save Simon, much less herself now.
Back in the Mushroom War era, Simon eventually manages a brief enough moment of sanity to remove the Ice Crown, but of course by then it is too late. He cannot find Betty anywhere.
[Season 5 Episode 48 "Betty"]

Mushroom War Era: Simon's Video Logs

"Hello. My name is Simon Petrikov. I am recording this tape so that people will know my story. I was studying to become an antiquarian of ancient artifacts. Now I never believed in the supernatural stuff myself, just had a fascination with superstitions. But everything changed when I came into contact with this item."
"Since then, I now see the visions always, whether or not I wear the crown. They tell me the secrets. The secrets of the ice and snow. That the power of the crown will save me with its frost. I don't yet know what this means. As you can see, my skin is beginning to turn blue, my body temperature has been lowering at a supernatural rate, to what is now about 30 degrees celsius. I don't know when it will end. I'm really scared."
[Season 3 Episode 20 "Holly Jolly Secrets Pt. 2"]
Simon's descent into senility and madness is now inevitable. In video recordings, he documents this deterioration. The white hair and beard are becoming permanent, and even if he shaves or cuts, it all just grows right back in short time. His skin has started to turn slightly blue, and his spaced out attachment to the crown grows ever stronger. All the while, he raves about the loss of his darling Betty, wondering where she could be. In outrageous fits he cries out begging for her to come back and love him again. Outside of his window, we can see his madness spawning a maelstrom of snow and ice, but beyond the snow lies an even greater storm. The mysterious International Crisis is escalating, and war and apocalypse are on the horizon.

Mushroom War Era: The Mushroom War

"Today I was to start my scientific journal on the aftermath of the massive worldwide destruction. The mutagenic horrors. The glowing rainstorms. The waves of toxicity in the atmosphere. Those glowing particles that ride the air currents and blow through the ruined cities at night like butterflies."
[Simon's Journal, Day 1]
"Some Wizards believe that the Bombs of War unleashed powerful bursts of energy and altered the Fundamental Particles making up the planet, giving them a new quality of Elasticity."
"With this new Elasticity of Reality came the interpenetration of otherwise separate vibratory fields, also known as Alternate Worlds or Parallel Dimensions."
"It is possible, then, that heretofore-unknown principles of Science manifested, creating entirely new races, species, and interspecific hybrid creatures. Life became more flexible and elastic."
"Strange Scientific Laws also emerged, as the new flexibility of Matter and Energy interacted with Life Energy - also known as Consciousness."
[The Enchiridion]
Eventually the International Crisis must have reached a tipping point, and the world erupted into apocalyptic nuclear warfare. Armies clashed, and navies and air forces sank and shot each other down, but all military confrontation was dwarfed by the bombs. With such incredible and unprecedented force, in such unimaginable abundance, they shook every inch of the planet's surface and tore at the very fabric of the dimension. Their intense energy became imparted into the "fundamental particles", exponentially increasing their vibration and the elasticity of the Earth locale of space-time. This made the rules of reality within the planet's vicinity much more flexible, and the world became almost...like a cartoon.
Over the next one thousand years, the planet would change in incredible ways; old continents would break and sink and crash together, the biosphere would flourish more colorfully than ten thousand rainbows, and for the first time in millennia, the inhabitants of this broken planet would tap into the Cosmic Imagination, and Magic would awake triumphantly from its long slumber. From the ashes of the worldwide mass destruction would arise a spectacular new host of realms, and on one particular island continent would rise the most spectacular of them all; the Land of Ooo.
In the Valley of Death this most brilliant flower would soon blossom, but its fate was not yet secured. Life and death come with each other, and the life that rose from the ruins of the Mushroom War came with incredible death; billions upon billions of every species of every kingdom and phylum had perished in the conflict, and the death did not end with the last bomb, for the last bomb did not seek to win any petty struggle of man; it sought to extinguish all life, and to achieve this end it would persist until the end of time. A foul and ancient being had manipulated the chaos of war, and with spellbound whispers it did extort the souls of the innocent, driving them to manufacture a horrendous and magical weapon far more powerful than any mere human explosive, enchanted and cursed by the creature's own primordial tongue. With its ultimate Mushroom Bomb, the extinction avatar of the green Catalyst Comet ended the great Mushroom War, and rebirthed itself for the last time as the Lich.
(The real life dates associated with the war are likely not super important, but if you really wanna know, current clues point to the war having taken place some time around or after the late 1980s or early 1990s. So far, there have been two songs featured from this time on the show: "Where Everybody Knows Your Name", part of the intro to the 1982-1983 sitcom "Cheers", and "According to Our New Arrival", part of the intro to the 1985-1990 sitcom "Mr. Belvedere".)

Mushroom War Era: The Lich

"You are alone, child. There is only darkness for you, and only death for your people. These ancients are just the beginning. I will command a great, and terrible army. And we will sail to a billion worlds. We will sail until every light has been extinguished. You are strong child. But I am beyond strength. I am the end. And I have come for you, Finn."
[Season 6 Episode 2 "Escape from the Citadel]
"In fantasy fiction, a lich is a type of undead creature. Often such a creature is the result of a transformation, as a powerful magician or king striving for eternal life uses spells or rituals to bind his intellect to his phylactery and thereby achieve a form of immortality."
[Wikipedia]
Some thousands of years before the Mushroom War, in the time of Urgence Evergreen, the horned Catalyst Comet came to Earth, and from the comet came a creature. We do not know what happened to the creature when it first incarnated, as it walked or crawled through the sun blotted age of extinction wrought by its mother comet. We do not know what it did to the world when it was born. We do not know what the world did to it. We do not know how many times it died and was reborn over the eons before the Mushroom War, or how many times it tried its hand at snuffing out the biosphere. This creature has no name that we know of, but it ached for the extinction of all life. It was not the Lich, but a predecessor; just as Finn began as a butterfly, the incarnation that would *become* the Lich started as something else.
Most likely, the creature started out as something far removed from its present form, something just as harmless and incapable of effecting major change as the butterfly. This would explain why, after the green Catalyst Comet itself likely wiped out the dinosaurs and the elementals, its first harmless incarnation did not - could not - continue on to fulfill its "ache for extinction" and wipe out the remaining life on Earth. So it waited for reincarnation. The creature waited and lived and died for thousands of years to be reincarnated into a form suitable for carrying out total, mass extinction of all life. And eventually it was, when the incarnation of the green Catalyst Comet that would *become* the Lich was born. This incarnation was still not yet the Lich, but it would eventually utilize the Mushroom Bomb to transmute its physical form and become the Lich, and in doing so forego the need for reincarnation forever.
Prior to the Mushroom War, perhaps for centuries or even millennia, this most recent incarnation of the green Catalyst Comet - humanoid in form - began studying dark and deadly magic. The ancient comet’s ache for extinction still burned deep within its soul, but wisdom accumulated over many millennia of failures and hindered progress had taught it one valuable lesson: life was resilient. For thousands of years, the biosphere of a single pebble of a planet had spat in the face of every attempt on its life. No matter how hard it was hit, no matter how close it came to total annihilation, life on Earth always managed to survive and bounce back. The ultimate evil was determined to wipe out all life everywhere, thereby destroying the Consensus Reality and the Multiverse, and returning reality to its primordial state. Even as the manifestation of a Catalyst Comet though, the extinction avatar needed more power if it were to succeed. To extinguish all life, it would first have to give up its own: to this end it did craft and amalgamate itself into the Mushroom Bomb and unleash it upon the world, in a magnificent, sacrificial necromancy ritual that would transform it into the ultimate, immortal undead.
In this form it was granted effortless mastery of many dark faculties; manipulation of writhing green and black flames and ultimate pyrokinesis, whispers that could twist and extort even the purest souls, and a constant exhuming of deathly air and breath that killed all life it came into contact with. The extinction avatar had at long last created its penultimate vessel, one monstrously more powerful and resilient than any that had ever before embodied the soul of the green Catalyst Comet. In this vessel, the supreme ancient force once feared by Urgence Evergreen had been reborn for the last time, and it was finally ready to begin its total extinction of the Earth biosphere.
The avatar of the green comet lets the dying breath of the world blow through it, then raises its bony arms and calls out to its new undead legions. The Lich marches forward, its campaign of extinction begun at last.

Mushroom War Era: Simon and Marcy Pt. 1 (The Demon Princess and the Ice Wizard)

"Whoever finds Marceline, please care for her. Her father is Hunson Abadeer. When she is old enough she will find her way back. Please keep my baby safe. I can't care for her. Please help."
[Marceline's Mother's Note]
"Between the two of us I don't know who is luckier. She is the first person I've come into contact with since the war ended. We can't save the world, but perhaps we can save each other."
[Simon's Journal, Day 1]
Simon Petrikov has lost everything; his profession, his love, his world, and with every passing day, a little more of his mind. He has collected his will and is strong enough now to resist the urges of the crown, but this only makes its whispers angrier and louder. It lusts for a master who will freeze the world, in twisted reflection of young Gunter’s admiration of ice magic. Years of Evergreen’s abuse wreaked havoc on the naïve dinosaur’s heart and mind, and now the crown bestows that same abuse upon Simon Petrikov. To him, peace has become a stranger, and his mind shakes like a rattle. Until one day, a peculiar sound cuts through the madness.
Hand on the crown, Simon follows the sound through the streets, ever cautious and aware of the danger that may lurk ahead. Yet as he gets closer to the source and the sound becomes clearer, his guard begins to slip. This is no monster wail or rabid scavenger. He peeks around the corner of a building, and there in the middle of the street, is a young weeping girl with hued skin just like his own, and ears as pointy as his nose. Suddenly all of the whispering stops, and the millennia old chills turn into warmth. For just a moment, the only voice left in Simon Petrikov’s head is own. He places his pack gently on the ground, rushes over to the little girl, and with a nod that says he knows all there is and more to her pain, wipes away her tears. He glances around, searching for some way to comfort the demon child, and spots a decadent toy store. Picking through the rubble he searches for a toy; a minor gesture perhaps, but one that will stay with the girl forever. Simon picks a bizarre looking stuffed animal with goofy long limbs, and judging by her beaming face, the girl agrees with his choice. Marceline Abadeer has just met her beloved sock monkey Hambo, and her eternal best friend Simon Petrikov.

Mushroom War Era: Simon and Marcy Pt. 2 (Brave New World)

"There's a lot more of that unknown pink substance growing and expanding in blobs and chunks all over the cityscape. It's hanging everywhere."
"There were things moving through the streets right below us. They were like people, but floating, transparent. Some white, some reddish, some bluish. Our eyes had to get used to it. You had to squint just right to see them. And the more we looked the more we could see. They were everywhere. Ghosts. It was as if the population of the city had turned into transparent ghosts, hundreds of ghost pedestrians walking up and down the streets below."
[Simon's Journal Day 40-ish, Day 50-Something-ish]
Simon and Marcy have been traveling together for around two months now, but it's hard to tell exactly how long it's been: as if the apocalypse didn't already make it difficult enough to keep track of the days, Simon's mind is still slipping. The dating of his journal entries has quickly fallen apart, and he now resorts to guessing how long it has been since he met Marceline. He had a hard enough time surviving by himself, and now with a small child in tow, he must resort to drastic measures more often. In just two months time, he has used the ice crown often enough that Marceline has already become all too familiar with its effects on her new friend.
This is not to say the apocalypse is all work and escaping death and no play, however. The old ice wizard and his young demon companion have kept each other in remarkably good spirits in spite of it all, and every moment not spent surviving is spent laughing and playing. Simon turns each day into an adventure for little Marcy, joking as they scavenge through garbage and make their way across the ruined landscape. At night, after they've set up camp, Simon will sometimes crawl into broken televisions and put on little shows for Marceline: during the end of the world, it's a good substitute for bedtime stories.
For a while they move from makeshift shelter to makeshift shelter. A permanent dwelling would be ideal, but the Ooozers are relentless and always sniff them out. Named by Marceline for the acidic glowing slime they excrete, these deadly creatures seem to be the new dominant species in the post-war. They are both mutagenic and radiate evil, strongly suggesting that the Mushroom Bomb fallout is to blame for their existence. As seen in "Simon and Marcy", they are the primary, if not the only, foe that keeps forcing Simon to utilize the Ice Crown. Simon knows that if he does not find some alternative way of dealing with these creatures, they will inadvertently drive him insane via the crown, and then Marceline will be all alone. So he begins scouting.
Over many days, he tracks Ooozer movements and takes note of their favorite hive spots and hunting grounds. A few weeks of this and he's mapped out a rather large safe zone in the downtown area. He and Marcy make their way there, and after a bit of exploring and apartment hunting find a high up hotel penthouse in (relatively) good condition. It is clean, comfortable, and - most important of all - safe. Here, Simon has the high ground: easy to scout, easy to defend, and not likely to be invaded by the Ooozers. Hopefully, he will not have to use the crown for a while.
Ever the academic, Simon uses the downtime and safety provided by their new home to begin schooling Marceline: "I need to cultivate Marcy's mind. I must continue teaching her the basics - reading, writing, and mathematical skills." The nightly Simon-TV specials have come to an end and have been replaced by school, but Marcy does not seem to mind too much. Quite the contrary, she is in love with reading and writing, and her education has become the highlight of her time with Simon. Simon has taken note of this, and in his journal often praises Marceline as a brilliant and highly enthusiastic child.
"Marceline is the sweetest, funniest, smartest, dearest little girl in the world. I am so lucky I found her. I must keep it together for her. She gives my life a purpose, something to live for. I'd do anything to protect her. Anything. She needs me, and I need her."
(The events of Season 5 Episode 14 "Simon and Marcy" take place during this time)

Mushroom War Era: Simon and Marcy Pt. 3 (Three Years Later)

"Marceline, is it just me and you, in the wreckage of the world? That must be so confusing for a little girl. And I know you’re going to need me here with you. But I’m losing myself and I’m afraid you’re going to lose me too. This magic is making me crazy, and I need to save you, but who’s gonna save me. Please forgive me, for whatever I do, when I don’t remember you. Marceline..."
[Season 4 Episode 25: "I Remember You"]
For three years, Simon and Marcy have watched the world undergo incredible changes from atop their penthouse fortress. The other dimensions of the Multiverse continue to leak into the Earth realm, while new life blossoms unrestricted by the old laws of science, and is further boosted by the mutagenic fallout of the bombs. Creatures slip and fall back and forth between the dimensional rifts, and the gum sinews begin to retreat into darker and safer dwellings to nurture their hives. Somewhere hopefully far away, the ancient one continues its march across the planet, heralding death and disparity wherever it goes. For the demon and the wizard though, the Ooozers are still the greatest threat. In Simon's first journal entry in (probably) three years, he speaks ominously of the many "tight jams" he and Marcy were faced with.
"I had to protect us from al kinds of marauding creatures and I had to put on the crown a couple dozen times over the past three years and it has taken its toll."
Simon's ranting and ravings have grown worse with the crown's continued use, and even without wearing it he will slip into long periods of stoic silence as it seduces him with whispers of an icy northern kingdom. However, with these whispers has come a lucky, unexpected insight. Simon's strong academic personality continually peeps through the magic and steals bits and pieces of its ancient knowledge of the universe, allowing him to make progress on a riddle he has been toying with for years: Hunson Abadeer.
Simon knew almost immediately that Marceline was no ordinary child. The skin and ears alone were enough to cast doubt on her humanity, but what really intrigued him was her survival. The powers of the crown had saved his life during the bombings, but how could a lone child possibly have survived such a massacre with no such magical protections? As he witnessed the dimensional interspersions and listened to the crown's magic trifling in his thoughts, he had begun to hypothesize that Marceline's origins, especially as they related to Hunson Abadeer, were likely other worldly. Eventually, he got a chance to explore this hypothesis.
One rainy day, while staring out at the city through the penthouse window, Simon sees something bright moving through the streets below. He goes down to investigate, and as he gets closer sees that it is apparently some living being, a humanoid:
"A scaly red being with red skin and a head that was on fire, but with an even blue flame, almost like a gas burner on low. I spotted him from a distance moving through the wreckage. Fascinated, I followed him as he wandered around the ruins picking up an odd assortment of items and putting them in a paper bag."
Simon ends up following the flame creature into a grocery store, where it finally catches him stalking. After awkward introductions, he asks the creature about itself and its origin, and it tells how the bombs sucked it into the Earth realm. By the wild hand of fate, the creature further reveals its home dimension to be the Nightosphere. Hearing this name does not rile Simon's mind quite yet, but soon the gears will turn. Thinking he might as well try, he asks the Nightospherian if the name Hunson Abadeer is at all familiar. In a response appropriate to an inhabitant of Hell being questioned about Lucifer, the creature goes into a panic. This intrigues Simon.
From its paper bag the creature quickly pulls a marker and some milk, draws a rough smiley face on the wall, and splashes milk all over the place. A large hole rips between the dimensions, and the creature begins to step back to its home. As Simon tries to stop it and ask more questions, he is kicked in the face. The creature has escaped, but Simon now has everything he needs to find Marceline's father: his name, the dimension he inhabits, and a method of reaching him. This will be the last resort insurance policy if the Ice Crown takes Simon away for good.
"I know I can control myself for a while longer, but soon, weeks or months or years from now, when I finally lose it, I'll need someone to take care of her when I'm gone. For now I can still be responsible and protect her. But when it happens, I'll be ready to do what I have to do. God help me."
(At this point, Marceline is about 10 years old and Simon is 50)

Mushroom War Era: Simon and Marcy Pt. 4 (The Great Tidal Wave)

"Simon said we have to go NOW. He said the crown is telling him that something bad is coming, that we had to get to the mountains. He said we have to pack everything and leave the city NOWNOWNOWNOW."
"That first rush of the water scared me half to death, but it was also exciting. The wave washed over everything. When the water rose, we climbed higher, moving from cave to cave, finding bigger and better ones. It sounds weird, but those were the best times we had together. For a short time things felt stable. You'd be surprised how much a secluded cave could feel like a home."
[Marcy's Scrapbook]
As Simon finished securing a future for Marceline, his transformation into the Ice King began nearing its completion. He had started referring to Marceline as Gunter more than Marcy, and his icy ego seems to have become the dominate persona. Concerned but accustomed, Marceline takes note of these changes in Simon's old journal, which she has now taken up as her own.
In one particularly bad fit, Simon starts raving cryptically about some vague impending danger foretold by the crown. With shrieks and screams of "Gunther!!" he hurries Marceline out of the penthouse, and they begin a long trek towards the mountains. Poor little Marcy struggles to keep up, and between the stressful journey and Simon's complete mental absence, she is on the verge of tears. As they are scaling the mountain, she feels the ground beginning to shake and a fierce breeze picking up. The temperature plummets, but at least Marceline is used to that much. Eventually the two make it to a cave, and the crown finally calms down, and as a dazed and confused Simon groggily comes down from his latest fit, an enchanted Marceline stares wide eyed towards the horizon.
Beyond the city, a strip of the sky has turned black and is growing taller every second. The breeze kicks up into a gale and the cave howls, snapping Simon awake. Together, he and Marcy watch the base of the great tidal wave consume the edge of the city, as the thousand foot tall wall of water continues on unfazed. It feasted on all the rubble and ruin that they had become so familiar with after three long years, washing away all of the Ooozers and ghosts and gum and other dimensions. As it closed in on downtown, almost at the penthouse Simon and Marcy had treated like a home, the wave began to break. With a thunderous crash it slammed into the city skyline and let loose a small ocean over the borough below. Foundations shook and structures sank, and as the wave pulled back it took all the destruction it had wrought back with it.
For months, the waves kept coming and the water continued to rise. As more and more of the cities around the mountain range disappeared, Simon and Marcy climbed higher and higher and kept traveling. Even with all the preoccupation of traveling and relative peace way up high, Simon's mind and self control were still in decline. Amidst the safety and isolation provided by the mountains, he no longer wears the crown, but it does not even matter. Marceline notes that he still falls into his fits, and that they keep lasting longer and longer. It takes him more and more time to return to normal, and the fine line between Simon and the Ice King grows ever fainter.
Even so, sweet little Marceline finds great solace in the moments when Simon is truly Simon, going so far as to describe their mountaineering days as "the best times we had together." Perhaps it was because she could sense that it was the beginning of the end, and she wanted to make the best of what time they had left. In those quiet mountain days, Simon told Marceline as clearly and gently as his shattered mind would allow all about his theories on what she was and where she came from. He danced around the word "demon" to spare Marcy's feelings, but in her final schooling lesson taught her as much as he could about the other dimensions and the crisscrossing of the Multiverse, explaining how she was a hybrid, half human and half of something else: something from another dimension. She would need to know at least this much to make use of the preparations he had made for her, now over a year ago. And when Simon was done talking, he and Marceline would sit in silence together, holding hands and smiling, savoring every second they had left.
"For now, it's just me and Simon and the fireflies. All those little lights in the wind. From up in the mountains at night, you can see the fireflies move through the wreckage of the cities below. It's so quiet and beautiful. It's magic."

Mushroom War Era: Simon and Marcy Pt. 5 (Abandonment)

"Seriously Simon, please don't go.
"I...I have to protect you."
"How can you protect me if you're not even here!"
"I'll arrange for someone to come take care of you. I'll make sure he doesn't leave..."
"Please Simon, I could help you with this."
"Yeah, maybe one day you will. But until then, you have to stay brave, my fearless Marceline."
[Season 7 Episode 7 "Stakes Pt.2 Everything Stays"]
"I could tell he was slipping in and out of his old self. Sounding scientific one minute and then screaming nonsense the next. Everything he owns and has acquired over the years was packed in his sled. He was leaving, but I don't know where. He just says "North". I stuffed a few photos of us into his parka pocket before it was time for him to go. I hope one day he will come to his senses. It kills me to see his mind vanishing like this. The crown is taking him away for good."
[Marcy's Scrapbook]
The time has come. Simon has been fighting the ice and snow for a long time, and he cannot muster any more strength. He is old and tired, his spirit sore from the struggles, both outside and in, that he has had to endure; the loss of Betty, the destruction of the world, the constant fight for survival. The crown would have won out ages ago, had it not been for Marceline. How long had it been since he found her? Three years? Five? All that time ago, when the ice wizard and the little demon princess had found each other all alone in the world. For all those years, Marceline was the lighthouse in Simon's snowstorm, always helping guide him home no matter how lost he became. But now the storm was outside Simon as much as it was in him. He and the crown had become an inseparable pair, and a frigid, howling blizzard now followed him everywhere he went. There was nothing left he could do for Marceline; he could no longer wield the snow and ice to protect her, and his presence had become a threat. The crown is calling Simon north, and if Marceline follows him now, she will die.
In a broken shelter, Simon records the last of the video logs seen in "Holly Jolly Secrets Pt. 2", while outside Marceline packs and preps a dogsled for him. When Simon finishes his final tape and prepares to disembark, a teary Marceline pleads with him not to go. Deep down she understands the danger he poses to her and his reasons for leaving, but it still breaks her heart. Her best friend of at least four or five years - the only friend she has ever had - is really leaving her forever. Simon goes to wipe a tear on Marcy's face, but it freezes to the touch and he accidentally cuts her. He recoils and panics: he has to leave now before he hurts her again. Simon jumps on his sled, and murmurs a final goodbye as he riles the dogs and kicks off. Marceline tries to chase after him but trips in the snow, crying out Simon's name and begging him to come back. He fights his own tears as the spirit of the crown pours into him, guiding him north to establish his Ice Kingdom.

Millennium Era [Life of Marceline]: Hunson Abadeer

"I'll arrange for someone to come take care of you. I'll make sure he doesn't leave..."
Marceline spent her first night alone weeping into her pillow, heartbroken and numb. It just couldn't be real. Four years, and now it was all over, just like that. Four years of laughing and crying, exploring the world and fighting for survival together, all gone. For the first time, when she woke up in the morning - if she ever managed to fall asleep - Simon would not be there. The loneliness made her feel colder than the crown ever had. As she lay on the bed in her lonely shelter, she felt something under her pillow. It was a letter, a letter from Simon.
"My dearest Marcy. If you are reading this, our time together has come to an end. I am so sorry you had to watch my soul slip away. I can only imagine how hard it has been to deal with the dangerous, insane person I have become. But I'm hoping this letter will redeem me in some way."
"After combing through all the rituals and hundreds of supernatural beings Betty and I had recorded, I now believe that your dad is some sort of undead king. Or demon lord known as the "Nameless One" in a parallel dimension known as the Nightosphere."
"I did it Marceline! I completed the ritual! The portal actually opened! A rip between dimensions appeared. I saw Hunson and he saw me. Each of us watching the other through a weird rip in the barrier that separates our two worlds. After I completed the binding spell on your dad the portal closed and everything went dark. God knows what I did. All I know is that I left you on my sled, headed north, where I WILL ESTABLISH MY KINGDOM, AS IN ANCIENT TIMES GUNTHER."
Here sat an eleven year old girl, abandoned and alone in the apocalypse, who had just learned that her father was not only alive, but the king of demons, presiding at that very moment over the demon equivalent of hell. And he was just inches away from her. A little to the left, right there on the wall. The letter contained instructions on how to open the portal, and she could do it right there on the wall and meet her father for the very first time. Now Marceline was tired. Her head swirled as confusion and nausea set in where the sadness had been. Overwhelmed, she finally fell asleep.
When she woke the next morning, something was off. It wasn't bad, it was just...different. Marceline felt strangely more aware of herself and her surroundings, and a curious scent filled her nose, a strong scent. Her latent demon powers were beginning to awaken. She sniffed out the source of the scent, letting it lead her deep into the forest, where eventually she came upon a camp. For the first time in her living memory, Marceline Abadeer met living creatures other than herself and Simon: werewolves.
She quickly befriended them, a brother and sister pair named Remi and Rosella (founding of Rome reference much?). For days she travelled with them, learning all about their kind and sharing experiences of all they'd been through since the war. Being with them helped her think through everything, to slowly but surely begin reconciling with her heritage and the pain of losing Simon. Nervously, she eventually opened up to them about this, explaining what she might be and who her father probably was, and how she was working over whether or not to try to meet him.
At this the werewolves' ears perked up. The Nameless One, as they knew him, was not to be trifled with. In confirmation of Simon's theories, Remi and Rosella told all about the incredible power and authority of Hunson Abadeer, and the unprecedented fear and respect just his name commanded among the inhabitants of all things supernatural. To Marceline's shock and great excitement, they agreed to help her summon him with Simon's ritual. Alas, this would be a mistake.

Millennium Era [Life of Marceline]: The Lone Demon Princess

"He's HORRIBLE. The worst!! The first people I come in contact with and the first thing he does after meeting me is he walks up to them and sucks the life out of them! Now my friends are just withered husks in the dirt! It was nothing to him!"
"When I touched it, a strange feeling coursed through my veins, like a jolt of energy. This axe had some serious juju about it. Good or bad, I didn't really care. It's a gift from my Dad, and I will cherish it forever. Funny how your feelings can change so completely."
"I was TRYING to be cool. I thought I could make the best of an awful situation. I thought the worst was over. But then he stole FROM ME. HIS OWN DAUGHTER."
[Marcy's Scrapbook]
Marceline, Remi, and Rosella performed the ritual and summoned Hunson, but nothing about his arrival or any of the events that transpired thereafter went well. In typical uncaring, business like fashion, he sucked the souls of Marceline's only friends, making yet another deep cut that would eventually fade into the collection of scars she was piling up. She was terrified and angry, more confused and unsure of what to do now than she had been before. Meeting her father was supposed to change everything, to give her answers and make her feel safe and loved, but it had done everything but.
For weeks her father stayed by her side, and she tried to make it work, tried to let her father be the man he never could be before. There were a few times where she started to fall in love with him, his demonic charisma easily winning over her young and broken heart, but it never lasted long. He was too brash, too violent and arrogant, and he always messed something up. He told her a bit of her mother, took her to an old amusement park, gave her the family heirloom, the Abadeer Axe. But he had killed her only two friends, and then later their entire werewolf pack.
He was rude and ugly and inconsiderate. Oh was he inconsiderate. Poor young Marceline could endure his pain and ugliness to others, but then one day it turned towards her. Tired and weary, Marceline had her father stop at a highway truck stop, where she cooked herself up some nice warm french fries, a perfect self gift to lift her spirits and get her going again. And he ate them. Marceline left them alone for just a few minutes, and he came in and ate them. Stealing from his own daughter. Her hatred for him was sealed, and at long last, she opened another portal and sent him back to the Nightosphere. Once again, Mareline was alone.
Seeking some direction, any goal at all that she could focus on achieving, she set out for an old mall Simon had once told her about. It was in one of the cities they had walked through together, and Simon said to go there if ever they were separated. Marceline knew he wouldn't be there now, but she went anyways, desperate for something to do to take her mind off of things. For a few weeks she hung out in the mall, reading books, trying on clothes, making music on the bass she had fashioned out of the Abadeer Axe. She even found a new friend, a strange little red furred zombie dog she named Schwabl. Finally, she had found a friend that wouldn't leave her or be killed by her father. At the end of each day she snuggled her new pet close and fell soundly asleep, tucking herself in just a little bit tighter each night as the world grew strangely colder.

Marceline Era [Life of Marceline]: Marceline the Vampire Hunter

"I hunt vampires because of you! Staking vampires, protecting the last remaining humans. It felt like I was protecting you. It was the only thing that brought me happiness during those years."
[Season 7 Episode 4 "The Empress Eyes Stakes Pt. 4"]
An unknown amount of time has now passed. Marceline looks a bit older, and she and Schwabl have long since moved on from the mall. Marceline seems to be doing well for herself, and has set up a small camp, stockpiled plentifully with all sorts of food and supplies. In her downtime, she continues to practice her bass and read whatever she can get her hands on.
One day, something strange happens: a human walks by her camp. Excited, she goes to say hello. As she gets closer though, her heart races and she stops: the man has long, wizardly white hair, and for just a moment, Marceline thinks it may be Simon. The illusion shatters when a woman and child are revealed to be following close behind: Marceline has found a whole family.
Before she can go to greet them though, a strange creature leaps out from the shadows and poises to pounce. Its ghostly skin and pointy ears remind Marceline somewhat of herself, but it is much more monstrous. Before she can call out to warn the family of the impending attack, her demon instincts kick in and she lunges at the creature. The struggle startles the family and they flee, as Marceline rolls in the mud with the thing and tries to find some way to kill it. She has no weapons, and it is strong enough that she can't simply overpower it. As they tumble and turn, she reaches for a sharp stick, and plunges it into the creature's heart. To Marceline's astonishment, it poofs up into a sparkling cloud of gas: she has just killed her first vampire.
As Marceline comes down from her adrenaline high, she is filled with new motivation and great purpose. No longer will she wander aimlessly through the wastelands, moping over her past and crying over that which she cannot change. If there were humans here, there would be more elsewhere, and if there was a vampire here, hunting these humans, there will be more vampires elsewhere, hunting the others. With her demon blood empowering her, she has the strength to protect the humans, to be their guardian. After all those years of him sacrificing himself to save her, now it will be like she is protecting Simon.
"I owe him for saving my life and teaching me pretty much everything I know. I miss him so much, the poor, crazy guy. I miss him so much. And I'll always love him."

Millennium Era [Life of Marceline: The Human Tribe

CHILD: This is serious Marceline! What if I was a vampire? You NEED an animal hat.
MARCELINE: Looks like the project's coming along huh?
TOM: Hey, Marceline!
MARCELINE: Two Bread Tom, how's it goin man?
TOM: Oh so good, I had a hoagie for lunch. And even better, this ship's repairs are almost done. We should be ready to sail in another day or two.
MARCELINE: Oh, that's really great. But listen. I've cleared out almost all the vampires that are left. In another week or two, you won't even have to leave!
TOM: Aw Marcy. You're such a sweet weird kid. But it's not just the vampires, or the Ooozers. Or them hungry lookin rainbows. The latest atmospheric readings are going bananas, somethin big is comin. And it's gonna change aaaall this. No, we'd do best to clear out of this continent all together.
[Season 7 Episode 7 "Stakes Pt.2 Everything Stays"]
A few more years have passed, and Marceline is now as old as we see her to be in modern times. In the time since her first kill, she has become an expert vampire hunter, and a pretty good bass player to boot. Her demon powers grow ever stronger, and in her hunts she has discovered a particularly interesting ability inherited as a knock off from her father: the ability to absorb the essence of living beings. She cannot suck the souls straight out of their bodies like her father, but upon killing the vampires, she is able to inhale the vampire essence that they leave behind. In one particularly intense chase through the city, she utilized this ability after slaying one of the most powerful vampires of them all: The Fool of the Vampire Court, whose essence bestowed her with the power of flight and levitation. The Court was the ruling royalty of the vampires, with each member possessing special powers not held by ordinary vampires: flight, hypnosis, shape shifting, and instant regeneration. Upon learning of its existence, Marceline swore to take down the Court and the hive it presided over, in a bold and audacious push to wipe out the vampire race in its entirety, thereby eliminating the threat they posed to humanity once and for all. To this end she packed up her belongings and left the city for the forests, where the hive now resided.
One day while hunting for food, she thinks she catches a rabbit. To her surprise however, it is a human child, wearing a hat that looks like rabbit ears: almost identical to the hat Finn the human will one day wear. Marceline apologizes, but upon bearing a smile and revealing her sharp demon fangs, the child flees in fear. Marceline, desperate to clear up the misunderstanding, and fearful of the child's well being in the vampire infested woods, takes after them. They eventually lead Marceline back to a campsite, where she sees more people in one place than she has ever seen throughout the rest of her life. Curiously, they are all wearing thick, hooded animal hats just like the child's: this is later revealed to be a protective measure, with the thick hoods impeding the vampires' fangs from sinking into their necks. Marceline tries once again to introduce herself, but this time she accidentally floats towards them and her levitation scares everyone off.
Later that night, the humans have regrouped at a new campsite, unaware that Marceline is still stalking them. The leader of the group, a man known as Two Bread Tom, breaks out a guitar and begins a campfire rendition of "According to Our New Arrival." From the bushes, Marceline follows along with her axe bass, and upon hearing her baseline and beautiful voice, the child and other humans ask Marceline to come join them. She has finally gained their trust.
For some months, Marceline would stay with the humans at their coastal forest campsite, protecting them from the vampires while continuing her mission to destroy the hive. In this endeavor, she manages to kill two more of the vampire court: the Empress, who held the power to hypnotize, and the Moon, who held the power of instant regeneration. With these incredible new powers and her ever bolstering feral demon abilities, Marceline has become a force to be reckoned with. Her mission to eliminate the vampires may soon be complete.
The humans have more to fear on the continent then just vampires though, it seems. The cold nights that Marceline endured while hiding out in the mall have reached the coast, and Tom believes it is the first sign of a much greater change yet to come. He and the rest of the humans have been tinkering away, working on repairing a large cargo ship that Tom hopes to use to migrate the tribe to safer lands, away from all of the vampires and Ooozers and raincorns and other monsters and atmospheric changes plaguing the recently formed antediluvian continent that would one day become Ooo. But the vampires can sense these intentions, and what remains of the hive is not about to let their only prospective food source flee without a fight.

Millennium Era [Life of Marceline]: The Vampire King

VAMP KING: You can stop this now Marceline. It's not too late. You've got power now, I see it! But you haven't paid a price. It's makin you crazy. Marceline. There's no one left but me. Would you wipe out an entire species?
MARCELINE: For the last time, yes! That is literally my entire plan!
VAMPIRE KING: So be it then. You know Marceline, there's still another way.
MARCELINE: Give it a rest already!
VAMPIRE KING: No, another nother way. To save, my people.
MARCELINE: Wait! NO!
[Season 7 Episode 12 "Checkmate: Stakes Pt.7"]
The Vampire King and the Hierophant - the last remaining member of the court - have gathered what little is left of the hive to stage one final assault on the humans. Marceline makes quick work of the prawns swarming the dock, but is soon alerted to bigger troubles on the deck. The Hierophant - the Court shapeshifter - has emerged from his disguise as Schwabl and is preparing to feast on the humans. After a short scuffle in the air, Marceline manages to stake him and steal his potent ability, growing stronger yet again. But it may not be enough for what is about to come.
From the forest shadows, the Vampire King finally reveals himself and calmly makes his way to the ship deck. He is alone now: the vampire hunter was thorough in her mission, and has left no one else to aid him. Marceline is a curious opponent for the king: a half human, half demon mongrel who now wields the awesome powers of the greatest vampires who ever lived. The King is strong in his own right though, possessing incredible physical strength and ultimate telekinetic abilities. This fight is not so easy for Marceline as all the others were, and in time the two reduce each other to rags and tatters. The king does not wish to kill Marceline however, for in her he sees a creature much like himself, immortal and spilling over with power, a god amongst the ants that roam the Earth. And in her now resides a good portion of the legacy of the vampire race: would the king dare annihilate so much of his species' history and prestige? Eventually, he gives in and ends the stalemate, but not without ensuring his race's future. As the demon princess and the Vampire King lock arms in the final blow of the battle, the king submits, allowing Marceline's stake to sink into him, as he sinks his teeth into her. He goes up in smoke, but Marceline is in too much pain to absorb his essence, as her human-demon blood begins to boil and transmute into something else entirely. A much more potent kind of immortality and power courses through her, as her mind goes numb and a great thirst for blood wells up inside of her. The Vampire Queen has been born.
Marceline writhes on the deck in anguish, and as her human friends come to help her, she shrieks for them to stay away. Her head spins and her heart goes black as feral instincts begin to take over. She can smell all of it, all of their delicious blood. She panics, fear and adrenaline and hunger all coursing through her veins. She must get away. With what little strength and restraint she can muster, Marceline nabs Schwabl and flees, flying as fast as she can, trying to get as far away as she can before the hunger completely takes over and she loses control. Eventually she reaches a cave, and collapses, exhaustion and a bizarre new mode of starvation washing over her. She blacks out, and eventually falls asleep. But when she wakes again in the morning, she finds she has done something terrible: Schwabl is pale and cold, the red of his fur disappeared and the life in his eyes quickly fading, with two fresh fang marks festering on his neck. In her frenzied state, she had bitten him, sucking all of the red and blood out of his body.
Marceline is beside herself with self loathing and heartache. This was not supposed to happen anymore, she was not supposed to let anymore of her friends leave or die, and now SHE had killed her poor beloved Schwabl. Desperate to save him from the brink of death, she begins to scour the land for some kind of salvation. The search does not take long however, as a curious solution appears not too far from her cave: wizards, an entire camp full of them. Marceline, still in a rage, shrieks at them to help cure her darling dog. The pompous wizards are taken aback by her ragged and tattered appearence, but as Marceline grows angrier they start to fear for their lives, and from a strange book scribe a spell for her to use. She snatches the spell and prepares to leave, but as she does the wizards cast their magic upon her, foolishly seeking revenge. Marceline makes quick work of them, then snatches their coveted book and takes off. Back at the cave, she hopes and prays as she lays Schwabl down and prepares the scene for the ritual. With the strange book in hand, she recites the wizards' spell, and waits in anxious anticipation. Schwabl begins to twitch, then stretch, and then bark and jump as his life returns. Marceline is overjoyed, as her zombie of a zombie dog prances around and licks her face. She is happy, but tired. So tired and so very cold.
The battle, and all of her fighting beforehand, all of her loss and her heartbreak and years of running around the globe have made Marceline so incredibly tired. The vampires are gone, and the humans are safe. She and Schwabl are safe and alive and well. Surely as the world goes through the final stages of its transformations, and it finishes settling into its new form, she can finally stop running and fighting for just a bit, and rest for a little while. Marceline snuggles Schwabl close, lays her head down on the Enchiridion, and falls asleep into a deep hibernation.

Millennium Era [Life of Marceline]: Creation of the Ice Kingdom

Somewhere far up in the northern reaches of the continent, a terrible maelstrom of snow and ice is brewing, and it only grows stronger with each passing day. A man once known as Simon Petrikov stands glassy eyed at the storm's center, fueling it with such tremendous despair, despair from the loss of his darling Betty, and of his precious Marceline. The crown has taken them both, and now it prepares to take him. There is nothing left of Simon Petrikov to fight it, and so it takes him over, rebuilding and reshaping him as something new. He and the crown have become one and the same, and together as the Ice King, they plunge the world into a terrible ice age. For centuries the great blizzard will blaze, as this terrifying new entity shapes the land in the image of frost, erecting a magnificent new Ice Kingdom.
And thus was the ancient kingdom of Urgence Evergreen of the ice reestablished in the Land of Ooo.

NOTE: This entry has gotten messed up
This timeline is divided into two separate posts, with each post chronologically detailing roughly one half of the total Adventure Time canon. This first post - "Adventure Time: The Complete Story Pt. 1" - covers all events which canonically occur BEFORE the first episode of the first season. In other words, it details the history and backstory of the world of Adventure Time; everything from the birth of reality and the multiverse, all the way up to the point at which Joshua and Margaret find and adopt baby Finn. This includes the creation of the Ice Crown, prehistoric events occuring on Earth and Mars, the apocalyptic Mushroom War, the early lives of Simon Petrikov and Marceline Abadeer, the fate of the humans after the Mushroom War, and everything that happens during the roughly thousand year gap between the Mushroom War and the births of Finn and Jake.
"Adventure Time: The Complete Story Pt. 2" then goes on to cover everything (significant) that happens in "modern" times, i.e. everything that happens during the lives of Finn and Jake and all of their friends and associates, between the first episode of the first season and the last episode of the last season.
Adventure Time: The Complete Chronological Canon Part 1 => You are currently viewing Part 1
Adventure Time: The Complete Chronological Canon Part 2 =>

Millennium Era [The Candy Kingdom]: The Mother Gum

BUBBLEGUM: I mean yeah. One of the first things I did after making sure Neddy was safe was to start making the candy people. I was formed in the Mother Gum. My mind and my gum were in touch with dozens of others. Like a crowded womb. I guess I miss that.
JAKE: But Neddy's from the same place you're from, and he's a wet hot dog around everyone.
BUBBLEGUM: People get built different. We don't need to figure it out, we just need to respect it. Maybe he likes his own company better than I like mine.
[Season 7 Episode 1 "Bonnie and Neddy"]
When the tidal waves came and the continents began to sink and shift, the gum sinews that had once dominated the cityscape retreated into safer dwellings, where they conglomerated into hives. Many of the hives were washed away in the floods anyways, but those that remained began to placate and gather nutrients. As time went on, these "mother gums" differentiated, transforming into clustered colonies of gum "spores". With this the consistency and tensile strength of the hives weakened, allowing some of the spores to break off and spawn individual gum lifeforms.
One day, possibly after the ice age had ended, a certain mother gum growing on the ceiling of a decrepit, sideways, and sunken building in the middle of an otherwise barren and muddy plain released a particularly special spore. This thimble of a spore was a tiny thing, and with an even tinier plop splashed down in a puddle on the building's soggy "floor". Little baby Bonnibel Bubblegum waddled out unassuaged and smiley, and in the clicks and pops of the gum language said a final friendly goodbye to her family. As she was preparing to depart however, a much larger wad of a spore peeled off from the hive and landed on a sharp stalagmite, in a birth that would scar poor big baby Neddy for the rest of his life. Neddy, who had spawned as more of a slug than a humanoid like his sister, screams in pain and quickly slithers out of the building through a crack in the wall. Bubblegum gasps and hobbles after him as fast as her short waddles will take her.
Eventually the gum siblings arrive at a beautiful valley field, lined by spiky pink mountains in the background and a lush green forest on all sides. A stream of toxic fallout winds through the field, and at one of its nooks a one tree has sprouted, with foliage like cotton candy and branches like crystallized soda. A still panicked Neddy is drawn to an exposed branch on the tree like a baby to a pacifier, and as he begins to suck on it, his body swells and his pores begin to excrete a strange sugary liquid, a kind of candy juice. This juice flow comforts Neddy, and the new symbiosis seems to benefit the tree as well, filling it with invigorating nutrients.
Bubblegum is happy that after a rough start, her brother has found his footing in the world. Yet as she looks to the spiky mountains and thinks back on the rest of her family, she worries what will become of Neddy and the hive, all immobile and exposed, completely unprotected in this still dangerous world. The glowing valley field laid before her is lovely to be sure, but her birthplace was dark and dank, and poor Neddy was assaulted at every twist and turn until he came upon the little tree. Even if she knew they would be safe though, an impending sense of loneliness strikes Bubblegum's heart: in her short time on Earth, she has already come to realize that she is a social and familial little piece of gum, and she is reluctant to leave it all behind. So she begins building a new home.
Bubblegum takes the juice pooling around Neddy and creates her first child, the very first candy person. Then she takes some more juice and makes a few more candy people, and then continues on making even more. After a while she starts making the candy people candy houses, and together everyone makes a small candy village. They begin building a candy wall to protect their candy creations, when Bubblegum turns back and remembers timid and shy Neddy, who has sat in silence this whole time, sucking away at the tree producing the candy juice lifeblood that has thus far fueled the village, diverting his gaze and trying to ignore all of the noise and commotion around him. At this point, Neddy and the tree have grown quite large together, with Neddy now looking more like a fat dragon than a slug, and the tree spreading new roots and branches all over the village and its stout skyline. Partly to thank Neddy and give him the privacy his craves, and partly to protect the village core that he and the tree make up, Bubblegum begins building the candy castle around them. Now with candy citizens, candy houses, the foundations of a candy wall and a candy castle, a candy dragon and the Great Candy Tree, Princess Bubblegum's Candy Kingdom is off to a good start.

Millennium Era [The Candy Kingdom]: Shoko

FINN: I see...my past lives. I was a comet...A thing... I don't know what that is. Some kind of shape?
JAKE: Do you remember anything about the scary lady?
FINN: Scary lady? Yeah. I was her! Except she was a chubby tiger. No, no, no, wait, wait, wait. She was riding a tiger, and she wasn't scary.
[Season 5 Episode 34 "The Vault"]
As fate would have it, Finn was not the first incarnation of the blue Catalyst Comet to visit the Candy Kingdom. Once upon a time, there was a young woman (not clear whether human or not) whose parents sold her right forearm in order to finance a computer, and then promptly abandoned her at a dojo. Between the abandonment issues and growing up at a dojo, it's not too surprising that the child grew up to become a proficient thief for hire. This strange child's name was Shoko.
One of Shoko's recurring customers was the "Bath Boy Gang", a "rival camp" that was based "up river" from the fledgling Candy Kingdom. For a new job, the boss of the gang wants Shoko to steal a certain amulet that Bubblegum has either come into possession of or created, which apparently has great power and would help the boss become "the biggest cheese in creation." After threats and promises of payments typical of a shady transaction, Shoko and her pet white tiger depart.
At this time, the Candy Kingdom is still under construction. Princess Bubblegum is physically as old as she is in modern times, but the early Banana Guards are not quite yet ripe, the wall and castle are still being built, the fallout river is in the process of being covered "with candy", and the Great Candy Tree is still growing. Everything is coming along, but the Bath Boy Gang has proved to be a great nuisance to Bubblegum: secret attacks and sabotages on her people and her kingdom have become the norm. Luckily, she has been developing a potent countermeasure.
Shoko successfully infiltrates the Candy Kingdom, and begins to gain Bubblegum's trust by playing the thankful refugee and offering her labour to the kingdom's construction. After some friendly words and staging an attack in which she beats up a Bath Boy, Shoko becomes the princess's closest confidant. As a result - and also because she is one of the only other competent people in the kingdom - Bubblegum asks for her assistance in completing her secret countermeasure: the Gumball Guardians.
Together in a secret underground workshop, Shoko and the princess put the final touches on the two guardians and Bubblegum uses her amulet to activate them. As thanks for her help and loyalty thus far, Bubblegum presents Shoko with a special gift, carried by a very young Pepperment Butler: a new prosthetic right arm. Shoko is very moved by the gesture, and in a stream of guilty tears fleas the scene. The princess has shown her nothing but kindness, and in many ways has become her first friend. She still must steal the amulet however, fearful of the Bath Boys' response if she does not.
Later that night, as the clutzy Gumball Guardians work their way around the kingdom and stumble through learning the ropes of being guards, Shoko scales the the castle towers to reach Bubblegum's chamber. Just as she is about to snatch the amulet from the princess's neck though, the guardians catch her and sound the alarm. She quickly snatches the amulet and goes to leap from the tower, but a blast from one of the guardians' lasers throws off her footing and she tumbles into the river of fallout below. Bubblegum orders the guardians to save her, but the effort is futile: the river's acidity instantly melts the guardians' arms, making it impossible for them to do anything. Bubblegum reluctantly abandons the rescue effort, and Shoko and the amulet are seemingly lost forever.
Some time later, a horribly mutated Shoko crawls out of the river, amulet in hand, and makes her way to the grasslands of Ooo. Just as the sun is beginning to rise, she gives out on small hill, but not before happily noting that the mutation granted her a new, real right arm. Shoko passes next to a small tree, one that will eventually grow into Finn the Human and Jake the Dog's treehouse.

Millennium Era [The Candy Kingdom]: Rattleballs

"It was a much wilder time in the Candy Kingdom. I was a member of an elite robot police force created by Princess Bubblegum. Her previous attempts at law enforcement had been a bunch of goofs. Our righteous swords cut a swath through the chaos, but we were *too* successful."
[Season 5 Episode 46 "Rattleballs"]
The still literally unripe Banana Guards remain wholly incompetent and incapable, to the point where they often fail to recognize even the most obvious crimes as they are occurring. In the most extreme cases, the guards will actually cheer on perpetrators as they flee the scene. In response to this, Bubblegum creates an elite force of highly effective, rapier wielding gumball robots. This new police force fights crime with the judge, jury, and executioner mentality, employing excessive violence to apprehend - or rather completely annihilate - even the most minor of criminals.
The robots quickly eliminate all crime, but this may have inadvertently made the kingdom more dangerous. Whether Bubblegum intended it or not, the robots are excessively violent, to the point where they cannot function without fighting. With no crime left, they turn to an underground fight club as an outlet for their violence. It seems the robots have managed to contain themselves, but for how long?
Bubblegum is unnerved to say the least, and as a precautionary measure prepares to destroy the entire squadron. Rowdy as they may be, the robots are at least "100% loyal" to the princess and obey her commands without fail, which makes the round up and mass executions a bit easier at least. As she is sending them off in groups to be killed in a compactor, one of the robots begins to resist and move of its own will. With just fractions of a second to spare before his demise, Rattleballs cuts an indent from the compactor wall in exactly the shape of his body, allowing him to survive and escape, unbeknownst to the princess.
With the destruction of the gumball knights, Bubblegum reinstalls the Banana Guard. They are not the best, but it seems the robots at least managed to eliminate the harder, more recurrent crime elements within the Candy Kingdom, so the bananas will hopefully be able to do well enough. From then on, the escapee Rattleballs will hone his skills in secrecy and seclusion, transcending beyond his violent nature, and continuing to protect his kingdom and his princess from the shadows.

Millennium Era [The Candy Kindgom]: Billy vs The Lich

"Beyond Iceberg Lake lies the ruins of the Lich's tower, where he was converting the planet's life force into unholy power to destroy all of Ooo... but before he could, the Legendary Billy attacked him and pummeled him into the resin of this tree."
[Season 2 Episode 24 "Mortal Folly"]
The Lich has at last arrived in the Land of Ooo. Its whereabouts and activities since the Mushroom War are still a mystery, but its sights are now firmly set on this colorful island continent. It has constructed a tower around its Well of Power: a pool filled with what is seemingly fallout of the Mushroom Bomb, or at least an enchanted equivalent recreated by the Lich. In yet another grand necromancy ritual, the Lich prepares to convert the planet's lifeforce - perhaps what little is left after its previous centuries of extinction - into dark energy that will eliminate all life in Ooo.
Luckily, there was at this time a legendary hero guarding the land, the great hero Billy. Billy was a humanoid of enormous stature, an immensely strong and a fearless warrior who had effortlessly cast down many an evil foe already, such as the Fire Count and an Evil Ocean. When he heard of the Lich's doings, he set forth with his trusty sword Nothung and his Hero's Gauntlet to stop the foul creature.
The Lich, however, could not be killed. Billy ruthlessly pummeled the abomination with sword and gauntlet, but his blows did little harm. Some of the blows seemed to prove fatal, but alas, the Lich was immortal, and from the ashes of death it arose each time in a blaze of wicked green fire. As Billy began to tire from the great battle, he came up with a plan. If he could not kill the Lich, perhaps he could at least incapacitate it. The hero continued his barrage, but now drove the battle towards the Candy Kingdom. There he did corner the Lich within the Great Candy Tree, and with a final rally thrashed the extinguisher of life into an amber prison.
For now, at least, the Land of Ooo was safe. Princess Bubblegum sealed off the chamber where the Lich now resided, fearful of its continuing dark influence. For while it may remain immobile and restrained within the resin, its spellbound whispers still reach out to all those who come near. Bubblegum cannot risk anyone falling under these spells and accidentally undoing all of Billy's hard work. The extinction avatar has finally been contained, but how long can that really last?

The Candy Kingdom is complete at last, and the entire realm is at peace. Within the fully grown Great Candy Tree, Neddy continues to happily pump out the candy juice, and thanks to the dominating presence of the Gumball Guardians, Princess Bubblegum rules the surrounding territories undisputed. Through brilliant diplomacy - and perhaps other shadier, more coercive means - the princess has positioned her kingdom as the dominant superpower in the Land of Ooo: even in spite of her thoroughly ineffective Banana Guard police and military force. In many ways, Bubblegum is now the de facto leader of all of Ooo. For centuries, she will maintain this rule and continue to do all she can and more to ensure the safety and happiness of her goofy yet beloved candy people, as well as all the other inhabitants of the land.
And thus was the ancient kingdom of Chatsberry of the candy reestablished in the Land of Ooo.

Millennium Era [Everything Else]: Moe and the MO's

"BMO's one of a kind. I built BMO to take care of my son. But I guess I never ended up dating any women. So, that's sad. I sent BMO off into the world alone, hopin that he could find a family of his own. And then maybe even find somebody else's little boy to take care of."
[Season 5 Episode 24 "Be More"]
In the era of the Mushroom War, there was a human man named Moe, a genius engineer with a heart at least as big as his mind, and an insatiable passion for creation. Moe dedicated his life to toiling away at all his myriad inventions from within his MO Co. desert factory, building all manner of wonderful and magnificent oddities. Whether through some foresight or simple dumb luck, it seems Moe spent most of the war period and the centuries that followed in reclusion, hidden away and kept safe deep within the bowels of his factory. Moe was no coward however: he may have stood by as the war unfolded and ruined the world, but he was far from apathetic towards its consequences. He was simply aware of his strengths, and knew the best ways to use them. A creator's gifts belie the making of life, not its salvation, and in the desolation of the Mushroom War, a creator was exactly what the world needed.
As the world outside gave way to many new and wondrous lifeforms, and Bubblegum toiled away creating her candy people, Moe poured all of his love and affection into his MO's. Over the centuries, he built thousands - possibly millions, by his own estimates - of the big and small, short and tall, round and square, cute and crazy robot companions. In a quaint underground robotic city, all of the MO's and their father Moe lived happily for years. All of the MO's, except for BMO that is (and AMO, but I won't get into his story here).
Long before Moe started creating his robot family, he dreamt of starting a real, human family. Sadly his work, and perhaps a hint of shyness, kept him from ever fulfilling this dream. But he built BMO anyways, the most lovable and imaginative of all the MO's. As Moe himself states, BMO was special next to all of the other MO's in that he is capable of great individual thought and imagination, with a soul and personality capable of maturing over time. Not wishing to simply let BMO's unique life go to waste in the factory, Moe sent BMO out into the world to seek out his own family, where, of course, we know that he would eventually find Finn and Jake.

"These are the sleeping Fire Giants. They're the ancient protectors of the Fire Kingdom. Their existence is known only to those of the royal line, and their story has been passed down through the generations."
"There was a time before, when we were still...
Afraid of the dark
Then came the first spark, a fiery birth...
It totally rocked
Sentinels crashing down, out of the blue...
Creating a kingdom of red hue
Now there's only few...
These sleeping Gods have tremendous power...
Can cause a new kingdom to flower...
So burn as bright as the Sun
My fiery one
If light starts to dim
Awaken again
The slumbering ones...."
[Season 6 Episode 22 "The Cooler"]
Alas, the MO's were not Moe's first or only gift to the post Mushroom War world. For reasons still unknown, he designed and oversaw the construction of a set of incredibly powerful machines, monolithic stone sentinels capable of generating enormous amounts of heat energy, energy that could then be channeled to destroy, or to create. Upon their completion, Moe sank these Fire Giants deep into the crust of the Earth, where they erupted and bathed a dark realm in incinerating, life giving heat and fire. The planet's mantle blazed and dormant volcanoes roared with new ferocity, and whether Moe had intended it or not, he had just saved a faltering subterranean race. For as the heat of his Fire Giants rebirthed the ancient Fire Kingdom, the cold descendants of the primordial fire elementals were filled once again with vigorous flame.
And thus was the ancient kingdom of Balthus of the fire reestablished in the Land of Ooo.

Millennium Era [Everything Else]: Marceline and the Wizard Ash

"I'm not getting a new Hambo. There's only one Hambo."
[Season 5 Episode 29 "Sky Witch"]
When Marceline finally awoke from her long slumber, she was ready to experience the world. During her centuries of hibernation, she had repressed much of the pain and suffering from her youth, but it all fought back ferociously and plagued her sleep with horrible nightmares: all the heartbreak of growing up watching Simon fall apart, all the loneliness when her best friend abandoned her and her own father turned out to be nothing more than a thug. Upon waking, she convinced herself that her restless nap had been refreshing, but in her heart she knew this to be a lie.
With Hambo and Schwabl in tow, Marceline set out into the new world to make herself a home and a life. At some point, she met the wizard Ash. Ash was a brash, immature, and uncaring jerk - by Marceline's own later admission - but at the height of her post-hibernation teenage angst, she wasn't much different, and the two made a good, if unstable, match. For a while they dated, and it all went well enough that they eventually got a place together: Finn and Jake's future treehouse. The fantasy could only last so long though, and when Ash trifled in Marceline's troubled past, everything fell apart. Arrogant and inconsiderate as ever, the wizard stole the raggedy old teddy bear Hambo, and sold it to the sky witch Maja in exchange for an unimpressive new magic wand. Marceline was furious, and in a terrifying rage, her vampire powers flared out and she unleashed her wrath upon the frightened and bewildered wizard. Needless to say, their relationship was over.
It hadn't taken long for Marceline's past to catch up to her. She had become careless in her rush to leave it all behind and start anew, and this had cost her dearly. Her precious Hambo, given to her all those centuries ago by her best and first friend Simon Petrikov, was gone. With this devastating loss, Marceline repressed her tragic past even further into the depths of her soul. It wouldn't be until much later that she finally started to come to terms with it all.

Millennium Era [Everything Else]: Magic Man Banished

"Magic Man, it bums me out to see this. I remember when you were really cool, before that night you spent on Olympus Mons with Margles. What happened, Magic? Why did you go crazy? If you had just learned to care about living things again, you could have come back whenever you wanted!"
[Season 4 Episode 15 "Sons of Mars"]
Over the millennia since the first coming of GOLB, Magic Man had become a horribly depraved and twisted creature. He is now little more than an incredibly overpowered prankster, but there is little humor to be found in his often devastating pranks.
"Plague of shadows. Magic Man brought our shadows to life. They attacked us, and ravaged Mars. To the plague of the oneness. As we gathered to hold hands and sing our community song, Magic Man cast an evil spell that made our arms grow together. Much suffering ensued. And what about that one time when he turned all the water into hair, and we all got so thirsty we drank it? And when we drank it, we went bald! Many of us did not recover and to this day, hide our losses behind groovy headgear."
In response, roughly two hundred years before the start of the show, Abraham Lincoln and Grob Gob Glob Grod banish Magic Man to Earth, where they hope he will learn to love again and recover his lost sanity. As we know all too well though, this punishment was largely ineffective.
(Magic Man's "hair into water" prank must have occurred before the first coming of Orgalorg, since Grob Gob Glob Grod is seen to already be wearing his "groovy headgear" during his encounter with Orgalorg in the flashback in the episode "Orgalorg". But in the "You Forgot Your Floaties" flashback, G4 is not yet wearing his headgear, and has all of his hair. By extension, the first coming of GOLB would have occurred before G4's fight with Orgalorg, since Magic Man did not start his pranking until after the GOLB incidient).

Millennium Era [Everything Else]: Bubblegum Creates the Earl

"No... He is rightful ruler under kingdom law. It's complicated. I created Lemongrab. He was the first of my experiments gone wrong..."
[Season 3 Episode 5 "Too Young"]
Thanks to Princess Bubblegum, the kingdom and the realm enjoy unprecedented peace and prosperity. By her actions, diplomatic serenity defines the political landscape of Ooo, and the greatest evil to ever walk the Earth will remain securely locked away for a long time to come. But the princess is paranoid, perhaps rightfully so. She remembers what the world was like when she first came into it, along with all of the struggles and dangers she has overcome for her kingdom in the time since. As a result, the princess spends all of her time researching and inventing, ever diligent in her quest to secure an eternal future of safety and posterity for everyone.
One of her biggest concerns is who will watch over the land when she is gone: either by age or incident, Bubblegum knows she will eventually perish. The resultant power vacuum and complete lack of other competent leader candidates would be disastrous. To remedy this, she sets about creating her own heir. In her most audacious experiment to date, she uses a unique kind of candy not derived from Neddy's juice: lemon candy. All seems to be going well at first: the body is stable, and by infusing a piece of herself into the subject's mind, its personality and mental capacities should turn out terrifically. They do not. They turn out terrifyingly.
From the operating table, the creation rises. With cold, sour eyes and bitter yellow blood, Lemongrab silently ponders his first moments of life. Then the shrieking begins. For no reason whatsoever, Bubblegum's heir apparent lets out an incoherent and blood curdling scream and begins to destroy the room, running around like a maniac and shouting "UNACCEPTABLLEEEE" as he knocks over furniture and breaks beakers and bottles. Bubblegum is aghast, but after a few moments of watching her monster thrash around, calls in the guards, and with their help manages to subdue him. She has him locked up, and for days attempts to reconcile his behavior and fix his mind, but it is no use. Seeing no alternative, she banishes him to an isolated earldom far away from the rest of the kingdom. Hopefully this will be the last the Candy Kingdom ever sees of the Earl of Lemongrab.

Millennium Era [Everything Else]: Bubblegum and Marceline

MARCLINE: Bonnibel Bubblegum, always soooo prepared.
BUBBLEGUM: Yeah, I HAVE to be always "so prepared". We can't all just wing it...I didn't always have to worry about so many things, ya know? The Candy Kingdom use to be so small, so manageable. Then it kept growing, and growing, and there was always some new disaster to prepare against!
MARCELINE: Is...that why you stopped talking to me?
BUBBLEGUM: No, I...
BUBBLEGUM: I lost my hat, I lost my home, lost my people. I can't even keep darn varmits out of my pumpkin patch. I tried. I really, really tried. I just...I thought that if I shut everything out and just focused on work it would all be okay. And look where that landed me. All I managed to do was push everyone away. I pushed you away. I''m sorry Marceline. I've been a real dinger to you.
[Season 7 Episode 2 "Varmints"]
Some hundreds of years ago, Marceline and Bubblegum had a running in. The Vampire Queen and the Candy Princess could not have been more each others' polar opposites at the time, with Marceline ever the delinquent and Bubblegum throwing her heart and soul into her work and her kingdom. At first they clashed, fighting and bickering as the laid back vampire acted as a constant nuisance for the uptight princess. Their rivalry quickly evolved into mutual respect however, and then friendship, and eventually, love. It turns out that in the Land of Ooo, opposites attract.
The princesses of demons and candy dated for some time, whether for years or decades or centuries we don't know. Sadly, as the Candy Kingdom grew, Bubblegum became more and more wrapped up in her work and the politics of the land, and she began to ignore Marceline. A rift formed between the two, with Marceline's immaturity and continued repression of her past making it difficult for her to sympathize with others and commit to a relationship, likely exacerbating the situation. Eventually the two grew apart and stopped speaking, and for years afterwards looked at each other with heartbroken and nostalgic disdain.

Jake the Dog Era: Joshua the Demon Hunter

Joshua the dog, eventual father of Jake and Jermaine the dogs and Finn the human, was once a great demon hunter. The fast talking, smooth styling dog lived and breathed for battle and adventure, a lifestyle that would one day be carried on by two of his three sons.
Perhaps the greatest of Joshua's demon adversaries was the red demon Kee-Oth, a blood demon whose self set victory condition was to suck Joshua's blood. The two held a long standing rivalry, but for some time neither could gain the upper hand. Until one day, Joshua came up with a plan. When the two met again in battle, the clever dog seemingly lost his footing and the demon finally got the chance to seek his teeth in. But to Kee-Oth's great shock, the dog's blood burned him. Prior to the encounter, Joshua had downed gallons of holy water, the essence of which filled his blood and poisoned the demon. In a bit of a temper tantrum, the demon resorted to sucking his own blood, and from this blood created the Demon Blood Sword. Joshua promptly defeated Kee-Oth before he could use the sword by splashing more holy water all over him, and with the demon weakened and writhing in pain, recited the incantation to banish him. Afterwards, he proclaimed the blood sword as his own and designated it his family sword. With Joshua's eventual death in modern times, Finn would retrieve the blood sword and use it as his primary weapon for a while.

Jake the Dog Era: Flame Princess Born

MESSENGER: The word! The word!
FLAME KING: What's the word?
MESSENGER: The word is your newborn baby will have greater powers than you'll ever dream of.
FLAME KING: Uh... have my baby sent into the wilderness of the outside world to perish.
[Season 5 Episode 32 "Earth and Water"]
Since the arrival of the Fire Giants, the Fire Kingdom has fallen under the rule of an evil royal lineage: either that, or everyone in the kingdom is just inherently evil. The current Flame King rules with an iron first, and covets his power and throne more than anything else in the world. One day however, a challenge to his seat appears in the form of a prophecy: his recently birthed daughter is foretold to manifest great and unimaginable power of her own, the likes of which will far surpass her father's. The heartless king orders his daughter to be taken to the forests of Ooo and left to die, but his plans backfire when it turns out that the common people of the kingdom might not be so evil after all.
Rather than abandon baby Flame Princess as he was commanded, the messenger leaves her with a forest dwelling woodsman. His good intention goes horribly awry however, as the prophetic child prances through the woods like the happy, energetic baby she is, and her already strongly manifesting and out of control powers begin to incinerate the entire forest. Bubblegum catches sight of this from atop her castle, and in a fit of rage carries Flame Princess back to the Fire Kingdom. She demands the king contain his daughter, and in a threatening tone implies the consequences she will bring if he does not comply. In a display of Bubblegum's continuing power and influence in Ooo, the king begrudgingly agrees. His idea of containment, unfortunately, is quite literal: for the next fourteen years, he leaves his daughter trapped in a lantern above his throne. Deprived of friendship and affection, she will grow up rather brash and prone to angry outbursts, but still with a sweet and gentle heart underneath it all.
Eventually, the prophecy of Flame Princess' prowess would prove all too true. To date, she has appeared as one of the most powerful, if not THE most powerful entity in all of Ooo. So far she has only been bested due to flukes, and it seems that if she went all out, she could easily destroy anyone who stood in her way. Her power is so great that at one point, Bubblegum worries Flame Princess would inadvertently destroy the entire planet if she were ever to lose control, a fear that almost comes true after she and Finn share their first kiss.

Jake the Dog Era: Joshua Births Jake, Margaret Births Jermaine

"Yes, we've got one boy that I gave birth to and one boy that you gave birth to. Let's never tell him how it happened."
[Season 6 Episode 16 "Joshua and Margaret Investigations"]
Upon retiring from his demon hunting days, Joshua took up a private investigator duo gig with his wife Margaret. The two operated their investigative business out of an old Mushroom War era city apartment they had spruced up after Margaret had gotten pregnant: she was currently carrying Jermaine the Dog.
One day the couple receives a case submitted by Tree Trunks: someone or something has been stealing her pies. Joshua and Margaret drive out to Tree Trunks' and her (current) husband Wyatt's house, but the case ends up being a bit of a dud when Wyatt almost instantly outs himself as the pie thief. Tree Trunks is still concerned however: herself and others in the area are sure that there is some kind of monster nearby, citing odd feelings and abnormally large footprints leading into the nearby forest. Ignoring Joshua's concerns for her and the baby's safety, Margaret rushes off to follow the tracks, eager for some monster fighting action.
As the two make their way through the forest, a strange creature stalks them from the trees: a shape shifter, and one that is looking to breed. It confronts Joshua and Margaret, and during a brief scuffle seemingly "impregnates" Joshua by biting his head. Margaret, mistakingly thinking that her husband has just been poisoned, stuns the creature with a needle jab and rushes Joshua back to their city apartment. As soon as she puts him to bed though, she marches right back to the forest, determined to retrieve anti-venom from the shapeshifter and save her husband.
She follows a trail of "blood" dripped by the needle jab she had earlier inflicted on the creature, and it leads her to some sort of a bank. Within the bank, which the creature has converted into a lair of sorts, Margaret finds heaps of baby paraphernalia: toys, bottles, diapers, etc. Confused, she ponders that the creature itself may be a baby, not realizing that it likely gathered everything in preparation for the birth of its own child, which back at the apartment was beginning to sprout painfully from Joshua's head. After another brief scuffle, she manages to collect some of the shapeshifter's saliva, then rushes back to the city, while the creature quietly slips away back into its own dimension.
At the apartment, Joshua has thoroughly wrecked the place as he thrashes around in the early stages of his labor. Margaret follows his trail of destruction to find him heaving in an alley outside, and at that moment she herself begins to give birth. Jake erupts from Joshua's head in a disgusting Athenian birth, and in his first moments of life performs a bizarre Michigan J. Frog interpretation, before immediately passing out in his own birth goo. The shock of witnessing this triggers the final stages of Margaret's own labor, and she gives a much more normal birth to Jermaine. Two down, one to go.

Jake the Dog Era: Finn the Human Born

"Hey Martin. I think I really need some answers to stuff. Like, where'd I come from. Or who's my mom?"
"Haha. Whoooops. Huuh. Okay, uh, a long story short you were born on aaaa boat, I guess. Like a banana boat. In the middle of the ocean. Sooo, all kinds of stuff tried to eatchya. Whales n fish. Squids. Uhhh there was tiger. Aaand. Seaweeds! These...seas...weeds. You're mom was...ok I dunno, talkin about it stresses me out. Maybe later. So one day, I got called on a dangerous mission, or y'know like a dangerous life choice. Two roads, diverging in the night n all that. And I couldn't bring ya along. I always planned to come back for ya but I didn't. That's...true...the end!"
[Season 6 Episode 27 "The Visitor"]
If Martin the space marauder's words can be trusted, then Finn the Human was born on a banana boat in the middle of the ocean during a vicious storm. Finn's inherent fear of oceans - not just water or large bodies of water, but specifically oceans - seems to back up this story. Other than that though, we know basically nothing. Why were Finn and his parents at sea when his mother gave birth to him? It is possible that their seafaring relates back to the human tribe Marceline had stayed with, but their migration seemingly took place almost one thousand years before Finn was born, so that'd be a tough connection to make. Supposedly Martin was called away on some "mission" by what seems like a giant spaceship, but whatever became of Finn's mother, or how baby Finn ended up alone in the forests of Ooo are still mysteries.
(Finn was likely born almost exactly at the same time as Jake and Jermaine, despite Jake being "older" than Finn during the show. In the episode "Dad's Dungeon", Jake and Finn are very clearly the same when they are babies. The likely explanation then for Jake's apparent seniority over Finn is that dogs grow up faster than humans, a trait which seemingly was passed down in an even more accelerated form to Jake and Lady Rainicorn's children.)

Jake the Dog Era: Joshua and Margaret Adopt Finn

"Look! It's the dog! The one you were prophesied to meet!"
[Season 4 Episode 15 "Sons of Mars"]
Shortly after giving birth to Jake and Jermaine, Joshua and Margaret find Finn abandoned in the forests of Ooo. The couple happily brings him home them, thus completing the dog family that Finn would grow up with: his father Joshua, his mother Margaret, his brother Jermaine, and his brother and best friend Jake. Eventually Finn and Jake would move into the treehouse together, while Jermaine stayed behind to guard their childhood home from all of the demons constantly trying to get back all the stuff that Joshua had stolen from them.
Finn's adoption, it turns out, may have been an act of fate rather than coincidence: especially in regard to his friendship with Jake. Remember how the Catalyst Comet that Orgalorg tried to eat was yellow? As it turns out, Jake is in fact a reincarnating spirit. We don't yet know for sure if this means that he is a Catalyst Comet avatar, but the yellow color of the Orgalorg era comet seems to strongly imply it, as does his one past life that we are currently aware of: Shoko's tiger. While Shoko's tiger is never explicitly - or even really implicitly - implied as a past life of Jake's in the show, one of the show's storyboard artists has confirmed that it was.
Finn and Jake's link may go even FURTHER than a shared connection to the Catalyst Comets though. In the episode "Sons of Mars", Finn and Jake end up on Mars, in the presence of Grob Gob Glob Grod and Abraham Lincoln. Upon seeing Finn and Jake together for the first time, the faces of G4 proclaim "Look! It's the dog! The one you were prophesied to meet!" Even if it turns out that Jake is not a comet avatar, it remains to be seen what prophecy foretold the brotherhood and friendship of Ooo's greatest heroes, as well as the destiny which they apparently share.

Future Era

"Let's go in the garden
You'll find something waiting
Right there where you left it
Lying upside down
When you finally find it
You'll see how it's faded
The underside is lighter
When you turn it around
Everything stays
Right where you left it
Everything stays
But it still changes
Ever so slightly
Daily and nightly
In little ways
When everything stays"
["Everything Stays": "Stakes" Miniseries Theme Song]
Where have the heroes and kingdoms of old gone, and what has become of the once vibrant island continent of Ooo? Did Finn the Human and Jake the Dog ever defeat the Lich once and for all, and fulfill the prophecies foretold by the Enchiridion and Grob Gob Glob Grod? Did Betty the Magic Woman and Simon Petrikov the Ice King ever escape their magical curses, to live out the rest of their mortal days in the happiness once stolen from them by the war and the crown? Did Marceline the Vampire Queen and Princess Bonnibel Bubblegum ever fall back in love? And what of all of Finn and Jake's other friends and companions and adversaries, of Flame Princess and Lady, of BMO and Neptr, of Shelby, Peppermint Butler, Tree Trunks, LSP, Gunter, Susan Strong, Ellie, Maja, the MO's, GOLB, Rattleballs, Martin, the rainicorn pups, Lemongrab, Jermaine, Neddy, Magic Man, and all the others? What Earth does the new Catalyst Comet hurdle towards, and what change does it have in store for this strangest of worlds?
The heroes' treehouse has grown into the sky, the Candy Kingdom lies dormant within the monolithic Prizeball Guardian, and a monster known as the Ice Thing now presides over the Ice Kingdom. Lemonhope and Cuber make their ways across a seemingly barren landscape littered with spacecraft, through a run down Ooo and a futuristic city that has rotted just as all the others had after the great war of old.
One thousand years after the adventures of Finn the Human and Jake the Dog, we have finally found Ooo again, and we see how it's faded. Everything has stayed, right where we left it, everything has stayed, but it's still changed, ever so slightly, in little ways, but everything has stayed.
[Season 5 Episode 51 "Lemonhope Part 2"]
[Season 6 Episode 35 "Graybles 1000+"]

Pending Historical Topics

FINN, THE LICH, FINN'S COMET, THE PROPHEICES, ETC
First of all, we still don't know for sure at what point in the timeline Finn's Catalyst Comet arrives. My guess that it was the Mushroom War era comet was based entirely on two things.
1. Finn's statement that he had been reincarnating "for centuries" in "The Comet" was literal and explicitly meant less than one thousand years.
2. In the Farmworld alternate reality of "Finn the Human/Jake the Dog", we see a comet missing the Earth in Marceline's flashback, presumably the Catalyst Comet of the era. Although our glimpse of this comet is brief and it's hard to actually tell, it does bear a striking resemblance to the actual blue Finn comet that we see in "The Vault".
Second, the Lich. The show made it very clear in Season 6 that the Lich is an incarnation of the green Catalyst Comet. However, the Lich's apparent arrival during the Mushroom War - specifically with the Mushroom Bomb - is a point of great contention and uncertainty. My proposed version of the story relies on three things:
1. The Lich is a comet avatar, and so like Finn it has past lives and reincarnated. Furthermore, the bomb itself cannot be a reincarnation.
2. The Lich is named after actual fantasy fiction liches, and so its origins are probably similar to that of other liches.
3. The Mushroom Bomb and its fallout are clearly at least partially magical, as shown by the Lich's incantations creating new mushroom clouds in "Mortal Folly/Mortal Recoil", and the Gumball Guardians' detection of evil within the Ooozers in "James II".
I came to my speculative version of the Lich's creation by following the line of thought "well how the hell else could it have happened?" Given the constraints of a. the Lich being a reincarnation and b. the Lich being a lich, I figured the "Mushroom Bomb = necromancy ritual" was a pretty good guess at what actually happened. It IS also possible that the incarnation of the green comet that turned into the Lich was just some substance that got used in the Mushroom Bomb: in "The Vault", we see that one of Finn's past lives was just some pink goo substance. I ignored that possibility because, let's be honest, that's nowhere near as exciting as an evil wizard utilizing a magical chemical warhead to make itself immortal.
Finally, the Finn-Lich connection. Most likely, Finn and the Lich are meant to represent a kind of yin-yang thing. When Finn is talking to the purple Catalyst Comet of the modern era, the comet says "I have embodied all that is good, and evil". This does not necessarily explicitly refer to just Finn and the Lich, however; the comets are the incarnation of all of existence, of which Finn and the Lich, and all they embody, are only small pieces of. They are probably not even the incarnations of the entirety of good and evil, respectively, but rather incarnations of the everythingness that is the universe, but in a good form and a bad form (if that makes any sense).
It's unclear how tight their connection is, or if the destinies spoken of by the Enchiridion and Grob Gob Glob Grod are solely and precisely about Finn and the Lich (and possibly Jake). In other words, all of the mumbo jumbo we hear about existence and good and evil and everything else might just be metaphors, rather than exact references to the Finn-Lich rivalry.
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EARTH, OOO, AND THE GLOBAL CRATER
Based on "The Enchiridion", "Simon's Journal", and the "Stakes" miniseries, we can assert the following with almost 100% sureness: before the Mushroom War, the Earth existed as we know it, with all of the continents and countries as we know them. We have strong evidence of this from Simon Petrikov's discoveries of the Ice Crown and the Enchiridion in Scandinavia and the Hindu Kush, respectively. It is also basically spelled out for us that the bombs of the war initiated massive, completely implausible and physically impossibly fast continental shift, and that this is what created Ooo and the other continents we see in all of the global shots of modern day Earth throughout the show. It is also explicitly given to us that Ooo is not the entire Earth, but a single island continent on Earth.
The greatest mystery then, is the enormous moon sized crater in the Earth. People have suggested it was the Lich's comet, or Finn's comet, or the Mushroom Bomb, or all of the bombs, or any other number of things. It's also fully possible that part of the planet just straight up broke off due to the intense continental shifting. For now though, we just do not know.
It should be noted that there have been very lose indications that Ooo may actually be INSIDE the crater, but my personal opinion is that this was a completely unintended trick of the camera angle. In "Sons of Mars" and "Orgalorg", the shots we are given do seem to suggest that Ooo may be inside the crater. However, in "The Real You", the camera very obviously pans in/out of a section of Earth that is nowhere near the crater. It also doesn't really make any sense how oceans and an entire other continent could exist inside a giant crater, but really who knows. This is Adventure Time we're talking about.
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THE ENCHIRIDION AND THE OOOVIAN CROWNED GEMS
The last we hear of the Enchiridion is when Marceline falls asleep with it during her hibernation. We know it likely contained the crowned gems of at least 8 or 9 of the Ooovian princesses when Simon discovered it, but how many were left by the time Marceline got her hands on the book is unknown. It's also a mystery what happened to the book after Simon supposedly lost track of it, how the wizards got it, and what happened to it/what Marceline did with it. Obviously at some point it was moved to Mount Cragdor (possibly a mountain of the Hindu Kush making up part of Ooo), and Bubblegum was aware of its location. This likely occurred before the "Shoko" event in my timeline, since Bubblegum has her crowned Enchiridion gem at that time. Does this suggest that Marceline woke up before the events of the "Shoko" event? No, because it's also possible someone stole the Enchiridion from Marceline while she was hibernating.
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MOE, THE FIRE GIANTS, THE FIRE KINGDOM, AND MARS
The Fire Giants seemingly arrived out of nowhere and created the modern day Fire Kingdom. In the most recent episode "The More You Moe, the Moe You Know (Part 2)" shows a young Moe creating BMO. On his desk, we see blueprints for the Martian transporter seen in "Sons of Mars", and outside of the window, we see a Fire Giant surrounded by a lot of scaffolding and a crane. Now, the blueprints and the Fire Giant could both suggest that Moe designed and created both the Martian transporter and the Fire Giants, OR it could suggest that Moe simply found a Martian transporter and Fire Giant and was recreating these things: really, either one is entirely possible.
If Moe created both of these things, then he is a much, MUCH more historically interesting and involved character than we can even guess at right now. If this was the case, he must have personally known Grob Gob Glob Grod, Abraham Lincoln, and probably have been to Mars. He could have created the Fire Giants for two reasons.
1. The Earth's mantle/geothermal engine was failing, and so he created the Fire Giants for the sole purpose of jump starting geothermal activity, or something like this.
2. He knew of the faltering Fire Kingdom predecessors and wanted to help them. Why he gave them the Fire Giants in such a mysterious way without ever contacting them is unknown. If this was the case, it raises more questions. Did Moe know of the primordial elementals and feel their kingdoms needed to be reestablished? Did reestablishing the Fire Kingdom somehow bring balance to the world?
This is the great part about putting together Adventure Time history. A literally 15 second clip from one episode raises so many questions and opens up so many historical possibilities.
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THE FARMWORLD ALTERNATE REALITY
Much of what we know - or at least speculate - about the Mushroom War comes from the special "Farmworld" alternate reality portrayed in Season 5 Episodes 1/2 "Finn the Human/Jake the Dog". This reality is created when Finn wishes from Prismo that "the Lich never, even ever existed." Before I start talking about it though, I must point out that this reality may actually be completely useless in lore analysis, per Prismo's description of wish magic:
"Wait, dude! Look, I like you, so you should know my wishes always got an ironic twist to them. It's like a monkey's paw kind of thing. You just gotta be really specific. Say your wish is: "I wish for a back rub". Who's gonna give it to you? A dirty man? A bear? And where does this "masseuse" come from? Do I zap some guy away from his family dinner? Leave some kid traumatized? Mom, where did dad go? Oh, I don't know son he just disappeared from the table... sorry. You see, Jake there are rules to this stuff, wishing an event to be changes elements before and after it. Memories will be destroyed, babies will not be born. Potential worlds could be evaporated by your wish!"
SEEMINGLY, Prismo granted Finn's wish by making Simon Petrikov freeze the Mushroom Bomb before it exploded, thus preventing the Lich from being "born". However, this must have been done by additionally making Simon and Marceline meet earlier in the Farmworld reality: in the prime reality, they do not meet until after the Mushroom Bomb has exploded, but in the Farmworld reality, they already knew each other and were good friends by the time the bomb was dropped. Ideally, we could compare and contrast the Farmworld reality to the prime reality to draw conclusions about the prime reality, but the difference in Simon and Marcy's meeting times alone may render any conclusions null and void.
However, there is one important thing that the Farmworld reality gives us insight into that we can trust: the Mushroom Bomb. The bomb itself is seemingly exactly the same and unaltered, so we can probably safely draw conclusions about it and the Lich based on its appearance in the Farmworld reality. These conclusions are:
1. The bomb was dropped from the sky, namely from a plane
2. The Lich did not exist as the Lich until after the bomb was dropped, since Finn's wish is that "the Lich never, even ever existed", but then as soon as the bomb goes off in the Farmworld reality and Farmworld Jake falls into the fallout, the Lich is created. How and why exactly the Lich came from the Mushroom Bomb is not clear, but Jake turning into the Lich would suggest something had to have contacted the fallout and been transmuted into the Lich, or possibly just taken over by it.
3. Billy's fight with the Lich broke the Lich's right horn. When Farmworld Jake turns into the Lich, both of its horns are in perfect condition. In the flashback in "His Hero", both horns are also in perfect condition, but the Lich's right horn is broken in "Mortal Folly", where it appears exactly as it should have been at the end of its fight with Billy.
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SIMON AND MARCELINE'S JOURNEY: REAL WORLD WAYPOINTS
The real world locations of Simon and Marcy's journey probably isn't important, but I figured I might as well throw out a few tid bits of geographical information that are in the book. The first is that Simon and Betty probably lived in St.Petersburg, Russia - at least at some point - based on a note of Simon's in the Enchiridion:
"From the Office of Simon Petrikov. Graduate Teaching Assistant and PhD Candidate. The Department of Antiquarian Studies and Ancient Artificats. University of Petrograd"
"Petrikov" and "Grof" are also Russian-y names I guess, so that probably also supports this theory. As an aside, how old Simon was when he discovered the Enchiridion/Ice Crown is unknown, but he's very smart, and so he likely wasn't any older than 30 at most while doing his PhD. This would also probably suggest that the time between his discovery of the Ice Crown and the end of the Mushroom War was around two decades, at least: he is 47 when he meets Marceline.
The only other geographical tid bit we have comes from "Marcy's Scrapbook". In one of her entries that took place while she was with Hunson, Marceline mentions "Route 90" in relation to the reststop where Hunson ate her french fries. I would assume this refers to U.S. Route 90, which runs across the northern United States. I'll let you come up with your own ideas based on the real life distance between St. Petersburg and U.S. Route 90.
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MINOR HISTORICAL EVENTS: DOG-RAINICORN WAR, JAKE THE CRIMINAL, GHOST PRINCESS WAR, ETC
There are a few of these minor events that technically belong in the timeline, but have absolutely no bearing on the overall canon, so I just excluded them. They are each the focus of exactly one episode in the show, and then are never really mentioned or referenced in any way, so they just don't really matter all that much. The three examples I've listed above were the ones I could think of, but I'm sure there's some more I'm forgetting.